author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

At least one post per week: Check. I have not been uniformly On The Ball since last post, but this much I can do.

This week's post will be my "what I had published last year" roundup. It will be fairly short, because 2022 was not a great year for writing new things or submitting regularly. But there were some things published:

New poetry: "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland," Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer Solstice 2022 (theme: Other-Than-Human Realms).

In fairy folklore, there's a story that turns up now and again involving a human who gets invited into Fairyland to perform some necessary function, and has to have magic ointment applied to their eyes in order that they might see true while they're there. Much later, after their return home, a fairy looks them up in their day-to-day and asks them, "Which eye is it you see me out of?" Turns out they did an imperfect job of removing the magic ointment, which means they've got a loose end to tidy up. Can't be having random humans going around able to see fairies clearly! So the human answers, "The left eye," and the fairy says "Cool, thanks," and immediately puts out the human's left eye. As opposed to dunking them in a handy ditch to just, y'know, wash the ointment out. Because fairies are cruel and capricious and, above all, dramatic.

Anyway, I wanted to play with that trope, such that the "eye" that had to be put out was the photographer's camera (the photographer's services having been engaged for an important fairy wedding). The fairy would smash the camera, and maybe even blind the photographer (see above: cruel and capricious), but of course the photographer still has the negatives, which they would pass down to future generations along with the story of the photographer's adventures.

One day I will actually write that poem. Or story. It could be a story. In any case, it wasn't what I wrote in time for this submission deadline. I wrote this other thing instead.

Reprint poem: "Reasonable Accommodations," The Future Fire issue 2022.62

My poor little corporate weredeer first appeared in Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 (Winter 2021). You can still download that issue, but you'll have to do it from the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine," because the publication sadly had to close its doors before Issue 4 came out. In which issue, incidentally, another poem of mine they'd solicited had been set to appear. Alas. That poem remains unpublished, and not for want of my sending it out. Maybe 2023 will be its year.

Reprint story: "Survival, After," Apex Magazine 2021 (or via Weightless Books)

Originally published and podcast by Apex Magazine in August 2021, this story was included, along with every other story they published in 2021, in the magazine's yearly anthology. I understand it's their biggest table of contents yet! There's lots of amazing stuff in there that quite frankly blows my little tale out of the water, so it's well worth the price. Yes, you could just go read all the stories for free on the website, but the print anthology, in addition to being extremely convenient in providing all the content in one handy codex (no need to click all over the place! Just turn the pages!), is a truly gorgeous artifact. It would look beautiful on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Reprint story: "First Breath," penumbric speculative fiction mag vol vi issue 4 (December 2k22)

Originally published in Ellen Datlow's vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings (Tor Books, September 2011), this is my most reprinted work--less because of its classic staying power, I think, and more because it's the story I keep sending out in hopes of getting it reprinted. But this is its third outing (not counting its debut) so I guess editors like it. (Previous reprintings: Denver Horror Collective and the Tales to Terrify podcast.)

I'm saddened to discover the purchase pages for the original anthology are gone. But I suppose every anthology must go out of print sometime. You can still find copies via that online retailer named for a river in South America, because of course you can, but it's no longer available via Macmillan Publishing or Barnes & Noble that I can see. So instead I've linked the Publisher's Weekly write-up, which actually name-checks me (I was a "newcomer"! I arguably still am) so that's kinda cool.

I suppose that will be one of my 2023 goals: Get "First Breath" reprinted again.

Anyway, that's the 2022 Publications Roundup. As you run off to click the links and check them out, do check out the rest of the relevant issues (or the relevant year, in the case of Apex). There's some great stuff in those tables of contents, written by some enormously skilled wordsmiths, and you need to get your eyeballs on 'em STAT.

Until next week!

So, happy new year! I have res... um, goals. Goals and intentions. One of them is to blog here more regularly, which probably means shorter posts, each with only just one subject. It's the very long, complicated posts that make this daunting and also inappropriate for the brief couple hours between roller derby and bed. (Speaking of which: I am tired.) So let's make this a short post.

Like I said: Goals. Writing goals, mainly. They are as follows:

Make progress toward getting the Friday Fictionettes Project back on schedule, via a sustainable schedule. One that doesn't involve trying to do everything in one day, or even in one week. Recognize that I am a certain amount behind schedule, and that, just as I didn't get there all at once, I won't dig my way out of it overnight either. The plan is... well, I'm not going to describe my plan here, because that is how I jinx myself. But trust me. I've got a plan.

Receive 100 rejections in 2023. Which means submit my fiction and poetry at least 100 times. (Optimistically, not all of those will be rejections. The first year I attempted this goal was my most published year ever. Which, arguably, is the whole point of the exercise.) Not a new goal, not for me or anyone else, but one I've had for myself for several years running and which I failed spectacularly at last year. And not just because I didn't submit regularly, but also because I didn't...

Finish more stories and poems so that they can be submitted. One thing that really dampened my submission game was running out of pro-paying or near-pro-paying markets appropriate for the pieces I had to submit. Which can happen if one isn't constantly writing new things. So that's what I want to do: write new things, new things besides the Friday Fictionettes. Not that Friday Fictionettes can't become new things for commercial submission, mind you. It's happened before.

Post to this blog at least once a week. I mean, ideally three times a week, but one has to walk before one can run, and in this regard, metaphorically, I haven't even been upright. To expand that metaphor, one blog post per week seems like a reasonable equivalent to, say, getting out of bed and moving around the house a little, maybe cooking myself a simple but nutritious meal?

And, in service to all of those goals: Stick to a sustainable and productive daily schedule. I've developed one over the past few years, accruing a piece here, discarding a strategy there, until I'm pretty confident that I know what works for me, as long as I do it and don't lead myself off course by 1. screwing up my sleep schedule, or 2. getting lost in video games and social media. I have some real foibles in that area, such that Catherynne M. Valente's recent post about being a writer with ADHD resonated frighteningly. I am not diagnosed with ADHD, and I certainly don't feel qualified to diagnose myself, but wow a lot of failure states that writers with ADHD talk about sound familiar. The bit about, whatever I do first is the thing I'm going to do all day? And the other thing, the one about limited decision making capability, such that if it all gets used up early, there's none of it left for writing? Which is a problem, because writing is nothing but one decision after another? Yeah. Extremely familiar.

The coping strategies I hear about also sound familiar. Have I told you about all the lists? Everything is a list item. With a little box next to it for me to check it off when it's done, so that I can get a little wind back from the sheer delight of accomplishing a thing. Everything is in lists or else nothing gets done. Nothing but social media and video games. Because the lists focus my mind and make the things I have to do concrete. Without focus, without solidity, I'm just floating from distraction to distraction, and it's bad.

So I'm working on it. I have my schedule. I have my lists. I just have to stick to them, and everything will be fine. EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

Did I say "a short blog post"? Well, it's a single-subject blog post, anyway. A single subject broken into a whole bunch of parts about which I had a lot to say.

Welcome back to the Actually Writing Blog, everybody!

Next step in returning to Normal Life: Roller derby practice! gasp - hack - cough

No, it wasn't quite that bad--I didn't actually have an EIA coughing fit or anything. But, yeah, it turns out my cardio is garbage right now. That could be a covid-recovery thing, but it's more likely to be a two-weeks-off-skates thing. (In general, I really haven't experienced any extra post-covid fatigue or weakness that couldn't be explained by something very normal, like, not exercising for two weeks, or driving all the hell over Boulder County, or not getting enough sleep the night before.)

But I got a lot out of practice nonetheless. It was Scrimmage Thursday. We had scrimmage-shaped drills, where we discussed strategies relevant to particular mid-game scenarios and then ran those scenarios. Between the discussion time and the need to swap out skaters on the track, there were lots of natural opportunities for a skater still rebuilding her endurance to take a break for breathing and hydration.

Our Social Media Maven took lots of photos and video at tonight's practice. Some of those photos are up already on Facebook and Instagram. (To those of y'all coming in from the Facebook rebroadcast of this blog post, I am aware that it's kind of silly to take you from Facebook over to this blog and then back to Facebook for the roller derby photos. But there are worse things in life than Silly.) Check back later for video footage.

...and that's all. (Look, a short post for once!)

Right. Blogging. Wow I'm tired, and it's laaaaaate. But I am trying to get back to this Blogging Every Day thing, so.

As I expected yesterday, today's antigen test came up negative. That makes two tests spaced about 48 hours apart--plus no symptoms for like four days running--which means I'm free to roam about the county. And I did, by golly!

I may have in fact overdone it a little. I feel great, no trouble breathing, no persistent coughing, nothing like that, but... Wow. Tired.

So. What did I do on my first day out and about post-covid? Well...

A bunch of writing! Which, happily, didn't differentiate today from the latter half of my isolation period. As soon as I felt well enough to be upright and do productive things, I did get back into attending one or two co-writing sessions most days, and that resulted in getting a whole bunch of words down on paper and in pixels. Which, if one can swing it (which I can't always, but sometimes I can), is a great comfort and a triumph when one is sick and housebound and demoralized and only able to breathe freely because pseudoephedrine exists.

I mentioned Cat Rambo's writer community yesterday--of all the perks listed there, the co-writing sessions have been what I've found to have the greatest benefit to me personally. They start at particular scheduled times, even the unmoderated ones, and so there is an hour at which I need to be not only in front of my keyboard and working but also in front of my webcam saying hi to other people doing the same. Accountability! It's been very good for me.

(It also resulted in some very nice social time at WorldCon. I got to go have dinner with a co-writing regular one night. Because of all our hours spent together on Zoom, I kept forgetting that this was actually my first time hanging out with her in person.)

So today started at 9 AM with the usual morning co-writing session, and I hit some of my daily tasks there. I managed a bit of another task over lunch, too. And here I am blogging! So I'm feeling pretty virtuous about it all.

I finally had that date with myself at Waffle House, thus fulfilling that weird craving I'd developed during my housebound time. I don't think I've ever had a craving for Waffle House before, not once in my entire life. But something about the combination of this Twitter thread and knowing I wasn't allowed to go created a fierce longing for hashbrowns and coffee. Well, for lunch today, I damn well went to Waffle House #1072, and I had hashbrowns (with sausage and cheese) and coffee. And the waitress was exceedingly friendly and welcoming and complimented me on my facemask bling. And, like I said, I even got a little writing done despite there being neither A/C outlets nor power.

I went to not one but TWO craft group meet-ups. At 11:30 AM there was Casual Crochet in the Park with Andee Graves, an event associated with the Longmont Yarn Shoppe. It will inevitably move back out of the park and into the shop as we move into winter. Not yet, though. The weather today was absolutely gorgeous. Then, at 4:00 PM, there was Wine & Wool Wednesdays at Maverick Fiber Arts in Lafayette. (The "wine" part involves a visit to the bar at the Brewing Market next door. It's not absolutely required. No one will scoff if you get a coffee drink instead. I tend to get this beer.)

I don't think I've ever attended both groups in a single day before, but I was going to do everything, darn it, and see all the people, and work on something like four different projects spread out over three different fiber crafts, and...

Well, no wonder I'm tired. Which is why...

I had a nap! And it was glorious. But then I woke up and realized I hadn't blogged yet, and I wanted to blog, so I figured, let's see if there's just a little more words-on-paper-and-pixels left in me. And there was! Huzzah.

I was going to go on with this blog post and describe all the different knit, crochet, and tatting projects I've got going, but once again, this post is long enough already, so I might as well save it for tomorrow.

You know, at some point, I should make a post that's substantively about actually writing. As opposed to posts like this one, which only mention writing in a glancing sort of way. But, hey, I've got a lot of catching up to do, and there is more in my life, it turns out, than just writing. Hence posts like this one.

(But only a semblance, mind you. Life has been Full of Things, as we shall see here.)

Hello! Hi! Is this thing on? *tap tap tap* It would appear I am blogging again. Yay!

So anyway, what all has happened since June? Well.

I had some technical issues. There was a long, drawn-out oopsie with this website, where suddenly, starting in mid-April, I couldn't log into any private directories, and after lots of frustrating back-and-forth with my domain host's support--I mean, lots, like, MONTHS during which they tried to sell me SSL certificates, they lost track of the issue among all the different support technicians involved in the email chain and had to have it explained again, and failed to even investigate the problem as I reported it--but eventually someone finally did investigate--and it was revealed that my .htaccess files were pointing in the wrong direction. The pathway that was JUST FINE up until that point in mid-April suddenly became invalid. And why was that? Well, it couldn't possibly be because some process or other had deleted the relevant .htpasswd file from where it had lived for decades, could it? No, of course not!

All of which is to say that I'm low-key in search of a new domain host. I'd love it to be a small, woman-owned business, but I know that lightning like DrakNet can't be expected to strike twice. (My current host, a small orange, is the company to which the owner of DrakNet sold the business when she was ready to retire from it.) I'm having trouble even finding alternate webhosts at all--I mean, where webhosts means "the people who store your files on a server so that domain registration can point to it, and give you access to databases and scripting and certain out-of-the-box software you can use if you wish" rather than "someone who'll design your website for you and/or give you a limited template content management system because you don't actually know HTML or CSS, let alone PHP or mySQl."

And then searching for "woman-owned webhosts" on Google was even more fraught. That's how I stumbled upon an intriguing forum thread from 2007 in which answers to same question ranged from "Silly feminist, why do you care about the business owner's gender?" to "Women won't own webhosting companies until webhosting is made simple enough for their ladybrains to understand." In the 21st century, y'all. I guess this is the techbro version of "women don't write hard science fiction because they can't hack the science, lol."

Anyway. Anyone know anything about Earth Girl LLC?

I went to WorldCon! Incidentally, this involved taking my very first train trip since 2020. Amtrak has long since stopped requiring masks on board, more's the pity, but I traveled in sleeper so I could close the door on my own private roommette, and I had my meals brought to me in my roommette, and I wore a mask every time I left my roommette, so I felt pretty well protected.

WorldCon was in Chicago, where the sister of an online acquaintance of mine has a condo up the north end of the Magnificent Mile, and so the two of us stayed there without charge, which was really nice. It did mean a commute of a little under a mile between our lodgings and the convention, but whatever, that's why I brought my skates. I did a lot of skating in Chicago, not only to and from the Hyatt Regency but also up and down the Lakefront and the Riverwalk. It was great!

And it appears that, after all this time, I've finally reached that point in my con-going where I cobble together my schedule based less on what panels I want to see and more on the people I'd like to hang out with. Oh, I went to panels, sure, and a poetry workshop, and a craft circle too. And I did throw my name in the lottery for Table Talks with Big Names in the Industry. But more often I signed up for a Table Talk because "Hey, I know that person from Codex or Viable Paradise or from Cat Rambo's online community. It would be nice to spend some time chatting with them." And that was lovely.

This was my first time attending WorldCon since 2011, when it was in Reno. Turns out I still very much enjoy the experience and hope to do it again in two years when WorldCon goes to Glasgow. I also very much still enjoy taking the train--and I'll be doing that again Very Soon Now, because...

I'm going to World Fantasy in New Orleans! Got my attending membership some months ago. Finally got my hotel room yesterday. Today I had a chat with Dad about logistics for family-and-friends visiting before the con, and later today or maybe tomorrow I'll wrangle my Amtrak dates.

The idea behind visiting Dad and them before the con is so that I don't expose any high-risk loved ones to whatever I might have chanced to pick up during the con. World Fantasy has posted the same COVID-19 policy as WorldCon did--which is to say, must be vaccinated to attend, must wear masks properly at all times--but risk remains, so might as well be smart about this.

I'm very much looking forward to a convention in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to Halloween costumes and people-watching and good food. I'm looking forward to skating around the French Quarter! I'm looking forward to visiting the Royal Street Rouses to equip myself with snacks and beer. I'm looking forward to wandering between convention programming items with a bottle of Abita in my hand, because it's Louisiana, suckers. Although I suppose with public masking required I may have to plan my beers with somewhat more precision than I did during World Horror 2013.

Anyways, that's coming up, and I'm stoked.

I skated a whole heck of a lot of roller derby! We had our season closing event on September 17, pretty much right after I got back from WorldCon. We set up the venue Friday night and on Saturday there were three (3) bouts, two of which I personally skated in. I was sooooooore afterward, but very happy.

In the intraleague mixer, my team won by three points. That's a seriously close game! There was a point midway through the second half where it was tied at 150, and I had to bite my tongue because most of my teammates would prefer not to know the score actually, and I prefer to respect my teammates' needs for preserving their Game Mentality. (This is a subtweet.) But I did sidle over to one teammate I knew did like to know the score, to whisper "Eeeeeee it's tied it's tied it's tied!!!!" and she went "Eeeeeee!" back.

Eeeeeeee!

The last game of the night was us versus Denver's C team, who beat us authoritatively but told us at the afterparty that we'd made them work hard for it. We were pretty proud of the score we put up against them.

So. Turns out, that was my last roller derby experience to date, because right after that event...

I caught COVID. Alas! My two-and-a-half year record for avoiding the plague came to an end when I tested positive on September 22. I'm fairly certain of the how, when, and from whom of contracting the virus, but all I'll say here is that it was most likely not directly from skating on the 17th, but rather from a social outing later that weekend.

Obviously I hold no grudge whatsoever against the person I got it from. They didn't know they had it until two days after they passed it on to me, and I didn't know I had it until I'd had plenty of time to pass it on to John. Once I knew, I tried to isolate, but that was probably a futile endeavor from the start. He tested positive a couple days after I did.

We'd both just gotten the new booster, like, less than a week before we got the virus. So aside from not having the benefit of a full two weeks post-shot, we were fairly well protected. That's probably why our symptoms were no worse than those consistent with a really obnoxious cold. But I had that dreaded rebound--return of symptoms plus new positive test--that turned my Day 7 into a new Day Zero, so I'm only on the exit ramp now.

But I am on it. I will say that with certainty. It's Day 7 again, I've gone three days with no symptoms at all, and I tested negative yesterday. Hoping for another negative test tomorrow morning, and feeling pretty confident I'll be able to leave the house and go among the nice people again Real Soon Now. With a mask on, of course.

(Maybe then the dreams about "What am I doing out among people when I'm contagious? And why aren't I wearing a mask?!" will taper off. Because yeah, I got those. Multiple times. Thanks, brain.)

And those are the highlights. There's probably more, but this is a long enough post already, and I might as well save some for tomorrow. Because I am going to try to blog again tomorrow. And the day after that. So do please stand by.

So I've got TWO things I would like to share with you, one on a semi-urgent RIGHT NOW basis, and that first and most urgent THING is as follows:

This afternoon! At the Boulder County Fairgrounds! We got ROLLER DERBY! Doors at 5, first whistle at 6 to start the Juniors bout, and then we got Boulder County versus North Texas starting around 7:30 PM. That's U.S. Mountain Time (UTC-6), and the reason I'm bothering telling you so is, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of our media maven Rickashananay, we are livestreaming via Twitch! Which means I get to invite you, out-of-town friend or fan or acquaintance (you know who you are), to be in the virtual audience and watch us skate from the comfort of your own computer or smartphone or other internet-enabled device.

Here's that link: https://www.twitch.tv/bouldercountyrollerderby

Of course, if you're reading this from somewhere in central Colorado, you should get the heck over here in person because roller derby is always better that way. Tickets will be available at the door all afternoon long. That's the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, Colorado, on Hover Street between Nelson Road and Boston Avenue, in the Exhibit Building--just follow the signs.

I'm really excited about this because it'll be our first time hosting a visiting league, and our first time playing a league from outside of Colorado, since 2019. It's true! You know why. And for that reason, we'll be skating in masks to protect ourselves and our opponents, because it's a thing.

And the reason I'm really hype about it all right now this second is, I'm DONE with my part of venue set up. Because I happen to know how to do it, I get the bout-day responsibility of making sure we have a track. I head up a team of three or four people in taping the track boundaries, jammer and pivot lines, 10-foot marks, outside referee lanes, penalty box boundaries, and any other associated marks. Well, today my team was ON POINT and we were done in less than two hours, and now all I have to do... is look forward to playing the game I love. I am an exceedingly happy skater right now!

(Also I am stuffing my face with pho. That's my pregame ritual and you can't take it away from me.)

So that's the urgent-right-now bit of news. The other bit of news is this: The Summer Solstice 2022 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer is out, and with it, my brand new poem, "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland". Do check it out!

Good afternoon! Yesterday's episode of Story Hour went very well. I'm pretty sure I only mispronounced two words, maybe three. I read my short story "Survival, After," which wound up pairing very well with Brian Hugenbruch's heartwarming "An Elicitation of Thursdays" in that both stories just pile on the weirdness paragraph by paragraph until you just give up and say, "OK, fine, jerky is nocturnal and puke can have great handwriting, whatever, everything about this is perfectly normal."

If you missed it, never fear, the recording will live on for as long as Facebook endures, and you don't need a login to watch it.

So. Thing the really Second. Referring to two Things of great potential stress I had accomplished on a day in late March. One of them was getting my laptop ready to ship for repairs. The other thing was this:

I had finally decided it was time I stepped away from my volunteer gig with the Audio Information Network of Colorado.

I had been reading for them since... oh, I forget. A good few years before they changed their name from Radio Reading Service of the Rockies to what it is now. A few years yet before I quit my day job with Wall Street On Demand. So... 2002? 2003? A good long while, in any case. Long enough that, as much as I still believed in and supported their mission, the only reason I was still doing it was because I had been doing it so long. Twenty-years-ago-me had decided to do it, and present-day-me hadn't really reevaluated that decision.

It was time to move on. With fondness and some regret, I emailed my resignation... and gave some thought to where present-day-me might like to spend those eight-to-ten hours a week.

First off, the easy answer: More writing! I'm not going to tell anyone else that they should write every day, but, notwithstanding my recent rant about YES WRITERS GET WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS OFF DAMMIT, it turns out I really shouldn't. If I don't write every day, it messes me up. I lose my rhythm. If I take the weekend off, I tend to lose Monday too, just trying to get back into the swing of things, and then Thursday comes too soon--so much for a productive week!

So maybe I don't want to take Fridays and Sundays off. Maybe I can use those newly freed-up morning hours for at least an abbreviated version of my Morning Shift.

And. Well. Have I? Um. Sometimes. New habits are hard, y'all. But more often than not, yes, yes I have, and it's a good thing.

Secondly, there's something else I've been meaning to do for a very long time. Something else at the crossroads of "volunteer" and "read aloud." And that something is LibreVox.

Turns out, I like reading aloud, but I want to focus on narrating fiction, both for my own enjoyment and to strengthen my resume in this regard. So about ten years ago, I formed the intention of volunteering for LibreVox. I even made a post on their forum introducing myself and everything. And then, what with one thing and another, the years went by. I never even recorded a one-minute test file, which is the very first step volunteers are supposed to take.

So I guess now I stand a better chance of finding time to do that. Good luck me!

Next time: Hell, I don't know. Probably some whining about how writing new poetry is hard. Because it is. Stay tuned.

As y'all know, the two major activities taking up my life right now are writing (see blog title) and roller derby (see blog post categories). And as it turns out, you get to see me--online--in both of those capacities, right now. More or less. Like so:

Watch me skate! This past Friday, May 20th, my team drove down to Colorado Springs to play against Pikes Peak Derby Dames. It went great. I mean, we didn't win, but we played hard, staged an amazing comeback, and learned a heck of a lot of the sorts of things you just don't learn until you go up against a stronger team. (Stronger for now...)

And you can watch! Roller Planet livestreamed the event, and that footage is archived and available. It does require a paid membership, but it's pretty darn cheap. I ponied up the $3.99 for a month of access, and wow I'm impressed with this outfit. It's good, high-quality video with three cameras and scoreboard infographics, and the audio includes a direct feed from the announcer's mic so you can actually hear him say derby-useful stuff like "Rickashanaynay is your leeeeeeeeeeeeeead jammer!" and also less explicable things which, OK, whatever, glad you're having fun, we are too!

Anyway. If you're interested, go over there and subscribe. Then, once you'll all logged in, click through the top-row menu to CONTENT -> SPORTS, then scroll down until you find the Pikes Peak Derby Dames games. At this time there are three games listed, and you want "PPDD All Stars vs. Boulder County." If you're looking for me, I'm #504 with the long braid, the gold shorts, and the fleur-de-lis leggings.

Come listen to me read a story! Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 25, will be my second appearance on Story Hour. I'll be one of two featured authors, the other being Brian Hugenbruch. Showtime starts at 8:00 PM Mountain Time and runs--you guessed it--about an hour.

If you click over to the Story Hour website, you'll find links to both the Zoom and the Facebook livestreams. I recommend going with Zoom if you can manage it. Zoom is where it's hosted, and Zoom is where you can participate in the live chat with the authors and host, and if you put Zoom in Gallery View you'll be able to see everyone at once. I mention that last because some of y'all may be hoping to see Holland bunny-bomb the proceedings. Last year he came begging for treats just before I took the mic, so he didn't make it onto the Facebook video. Alas!

Facebook is also where you'll go to see the archived video after the show is no longer live. That goes for last year's appearance, too--but be warned, that one turned out to be a bit of a tear-jerker. Be cutting onions or something so you have plausible deniability.

Next time: Thing the Second, but for real! (I reviewed my notes after last post and realized that Medical Appointment Tetris was not in fact Thing the Second. It was most likely Thing the Third. But who's counting?)

Oh hi there. It's been more than a month since my last post, so maybe let's use this post to tie up some loose ends from that post.

Regarding the computer repair saga: Space Invader is finally whole and healthy. But it's been a ride. In between last post and this, the LCD was replaced no less than three times, as follows:

1. Went to repair depot after the self-destruction incident previously described. When it came home, it looked good out of the box, but when I turned the system on, there were weird horizontal lines across the middle of the screen. Troubleshooting with Dell over the phone confirmed that the LCD, not the graphics card or the Windows installation, was at fault.
2. On-site technician replaced LCD again. Everything seemed fine for the next 6 hours. Then more horizontal line visual defects manifested, this time across the bottom two inches of the screen. More troubleshooting confirmed that yes, it's still an LCD problem. Or at least it's not a graphics card or Windows problem.
3. Went to repair depot for full diagnosis and, as it turned out, yet another LCD replacement. I was skeptical. They reassured me that they'd discovered tiny cracks in the LCD and it really did need replacing.

And indeed, this time when the computer came home, everything was fine. And has remained fine. Also, I now have a new charging cable. While I lost touch with the original phone support technician who said he'd see if I could get it covered as a one-time exception, I did wind up including the cable with the laptop on its latest trip to the repair depot, so the techs saw that there were exposed wires and could not let that stand.

Yay! Hopefully I may now hope for more than six months of uninterrupted use before the next problem arises, whatever it may be.

Regarding the item known as "Thing the Second": Right. There was another saga I was going to tell you about. That was the saga of Medical Scheduling Tetris.

Basically, I scheduled all my regular annual check-ups around late March and early April. Like you do. But when you do that, all the follow-up happens rather all at once, too. Which meant there were several weeks in which I was doing very little except recovering from one thing and preparing for the next thing. Which is to say:

• "Hey, you're over 45 now. Time for you to get a colonoscopy screening." About which, the less said, the better. It is done and I don't have to do it again for another seven years. Hooray.
• "Hey, that mole we scraped off your face at your annual dermatology skin check? So very much melanoma. We're referring you to a specialist to have every bit of it excised ASAP or sooner."

So now I am a veteran of what they call "staged excision" or Mohs surgery. This means they take as little skin off of you as they think they can get away with, then examine it to see if they need to take more. (I had the "slow" version, in which the excised skin had to be sent away to an outside laboratory, rather than examined in-house then and there.) I wound up only needing two rounds of excisions before the lab said that the margins were clear and they could sew up the open wound that had been just hanging out on my left cheek all that time.

So that was easy. For certain values of easy. "Easy," as in, "an hour at a time of outpatient surgery under local anesthetic." That kind of so-called "easy."

Honestly, the worst part for me was not being allowed to play roller derby. From the moment they first cut my face open until a week and a half after getting sutured up--so, from April 12 until April 30--I wasn't allowed to skate. Or bike. Or jog. Or dance. Or jump up and down. Basically, no hard exercise, no heavy lifting, nothing to raise my heart rate and risk getting things bleeding again. My friends, I was climbing the walls. (Only not really, because that would be exercise.) I kept going to roller derby practice, soaking up the drills mentally if not physically, helping train the newer skaters to the extent that I could from my sneaker-feet, but I couldn't skate. And then I could skate, and I did, a lot, but for another week I still couldn't derby, because full-contact derby involves risking getting hit in the face, which the dermatology specialist didn't want happening while I was still in a vulnerable stage of healing. Not that they wanted it happening ever, but they absolutely forbade it happening until May 7.

And then May 7 came along, and I could do all the things again, including a very rough-and-tumble scrimmage in which I did in fact take an unexpected blow to the face, which just goes to show. I was so happy I could have cried. "I hit my friends! They hit me! It was great! And check out my new bad-ass scar!" Yep. We roller derby skaters are a special kind of weird.

All of which leads to...

A special roller derby announcement! This Friday, May 20, I will be skating with Boulder County Roller Derby against Pikes Peak Derby Dames in PPDD's home venue, the Xfinity Roller Sports Arena in Colorado Springs. Doors open at 6 PM, and first whistle will be at 7. (Mountain Time, naturally.) If you're in the area and can make it, AWESOME! Be there and say hi! Otherwise, they do say on the event and ticket sales page that livestreaming will be enabled by Roller Planet. (I know very little about Roller Planet beyond that they exist and there is a small monthly subscription fee involved.)

So that's happening. And now you know.

Next time: An upcoming author appearance! And other writing news! Including new and exciting schedule variations! Yay!

Hi again! So it's vaguely more tomorrow-like than otherwise. Not a heck of a lot of writing happened yesterday because of two things that loomed disproportionately large on my radar, both of which I hinted at the other day.

Thing the first: I had to get Space Invader (my Alienware M15 laptop) ready to ship off to Dell's repair depot. AGAIN. Not because their previous repairs didn't hold up beautifully. They did! There have been no unexpected crashes, no soundcard problems, everything's been great. But. The other day, seemingly out of nowhere, the monitor just sort of self-destructed.

Seriously. I was was adjusting the angle of the monitor, lowering it so that it wouldn't dominate my vision during a conversation, when the thing hit an internal obstruction and went CRUNCH and John said "Stop, stop!" and I said "I know!" and I let go of the thing. The frame of the monitor had sprung open in the lower-left corner, and when we shone a flashlight in it, we saw a bunch of screws and a bit of broken-off hardware rolling around loose in the gap.

So this will probably fall under my Accidental Damage Warranty (which can only be invoked once a year), rather than the Premium Service Warranty (which can be invoked any time shit goes wrong) because I think the Dell techs don't quite believe the machine would do this without provocation. Like, dropping it several times (I swear I didn't!) or being less than gentle with my backpack when it's inside (I mean, maybe?). "We don't have a record of such issues with this model," my Dell Support contact said. The techs at the depot will take a look, decide which warranty to charge, and then they'll fix it. And I'll get it back. And hopefully I'll finish out my first year of owning the thing without further incident.

I gotta talk up Dell Support, though. I had finally finished all the backups and data transfers and the deletion of sensitive material, and I was ready to put it in the box (Note: Dell sends you a box with appropriate protective packaging material inside; Asus, last time I checked, does not), when I read the instructions and realized they conflicted with what my Dell Support contact had told me. So I emailed a question in and just hoped he'd get back to me sooner rather than later. In fact, he called me up not five minutes later.

My question was this: "You said I should include the power cable, but the instructions say don't. Which is it?"

His initial answer was as follows: "It's really up to you, but if your laptop's battery is out of juice when the techs need to turn it on, it would be handy to have a compatible cable right there."

I had second thoughts. "OK, but should I include a note that says, 'The visible, cosmetic damage to the power cable is not what I'm invoking my Accidental Damage Warranty about'? Or will they just include that replacement along with the repairs to the monitor as a single invocation of the warranty for this year?"

"Hmm. In that case, don't include the power cable. Let's not confuse anyone. However, when your computer is returned to you, email me requesting a call back, and we'll see whether I can get a replacement power cable approved as a one-time exception."

Well, that would be splendid. See, the plastic sheathing at the end of the cable that plugs into the computer, where it bends a lot, started sort of disintegrating after only about three months. Again, only cosmetic, but a little demoralizing every time I looked at it. If I get a replacement cable out of this, that would be totally sweet.

Thing the second: ...you know what? This post is hella-wow long already. Let's save the Second Thing for tomorrow's blog post, along with the February Fictionette Round-up.

In any case, after doing the two big-but-not-really things and then walking the package over to the nearby drug store for FedEx pickup, I walked a half block further to take myself out to My Ramen & Izakaya for a late lunch of ridiculously self-indulgent proportions. Then I took my overfull belly home to be pleasantly worthless for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

And that's why you're getting this post now rather than yesterday. Ta-da!