author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So. It's a new year. Contrary to my best intentions, I have not spent every day since January 1 writing prolifically and faithfully. However, I have replaced the bathtub drain stopper, which task has been waiting for me to get around to it since Two Thousand and Mumble. So that's something.

Old habits I appear to have rediscovered: Building a checklist at the beginning of my day and checking off just as many items as I can before dinner time. Using a 25-minute timer and my own idiosyncratic take on the Pomodoro technique to try to keep myself on task. Spinning wool on my break between "poms." Disappearing into the bathtub with a book and something alcoholic when it's time to run away from the checklist and the timer.

New habits I appear to have picked up: Roller skating. Attending open roller derby practice. Doing sit-ups and wall-sits in bite-sized portions in hopes of being less pathetic at next Sunday's Derby Days session. Eating my daily banana because, while instep cramps are bad enough, they're really special in skates.

I'd like to get back into more of a daily thing with this blog. Goodness knows I've got a lot of backlogged blog fodder. We'll see how that goes.

(Meanwhile, it's really really nice to know that the bathtub will empty at a reasonable speed without my holding down the stopper lever to keep the process enthusiastic. I think I might go refill the tub just to hear it drain. Bliss.)

When the child started crying, I didn't turn around. That's what makes me a sorry specimen of humanity. I didn't bother to turn around.

Why didn't I turn around? I suppose I must have assumed the child was having the sort of tantrum children of that age do have, or that, at worst, he'd fallen down on his behind and startled himself. There were stairs behind me, but I hadn't heard any noise to indicate the child had fallen down the stairs. I remember that going through my head: "He didn't fall down the stairs. Oh good." So I assumed this was just toddler drama and nothing serious. And I didn't turn around to verify my assumption.

This was in the "Hangdog Lounge" at the Boulder Rock Club. When I go to the BRC on my own, I put myself through small sessions of bouldering interspersed with writing work or, more often, internet playtime. What with the free wi-fi and coffee, the temptation is to linger. So at the point when this happened, I had done my first bouldering session and was now scribbling through my Morning Pages. I was sitting at the single tall table across from the coffee machine. And I'd taken the chair that puts my back to the stairs. I don't usually, but when I came to sit down there was a small child under the table, and rather than shoo him away I'd chosen the chair he wasn't leaning against. Then I looked up and said to the man keeping an eye on him, "I promise to be extremely careful with this," meaning my coffee. If the kid was going to be under the table, I had best make sure he didn't get a hot waterfall on his head. The man nodded and chuckled, disavowing any suspicion that I'd do such a thing. But it was the kind of thing I'd be concerned about me accidentally doing, because I'm all aware and responsible like that.

Which is the long story of why, when this other child began crying some fifteen minutes later, I was sitting with my back toward him rather than facing him.

Also on the mezzanine with me were three women and at least one child, all of whom had shown up after the other man and kid had left. And the women were actually turned to face the crying child. I remember glancing up at them, thinking Is one of them the crying kid's mother? I remember that one of them actually looked up, craning as though to ascertain the crying child's situation. Then she returned her attention to her conversation.

I don't say this to excuse myself. There is no excuse for my not having turned around when the child began crying. But when I try to understand why I didn't bother to turn around, I keep coming back to this: I saw a woman look up to see why the child was crying and then look down again as though satisfied that her assistance was not required.

I finally did turn around when I heard several adults come onto the scene. And my heart just about stopped in place.

The child was crying -- screaming, really -- because his hand was caught in the door on the landing. He'd probably been trying to get into the kids' play area, and the door had closed on his hand. He had been screaming for a full minute. Hearing the new arrivals on the scene, I turned, and I saw, for a moment, the child's right hand trapped in the door. With his left, he was tugging uselessly at the door's side-grip style handle. He was far too small to be able to open it and free himself. His head barely came up to the top of the handle.

Then the gym staff member had opened the door and the man who was probably the child's father had swept the child up in his arms. By this time my hand was over my mouth and my eyes were wide -- I could feel my whole face straining to make itself large enough to encompass my shock and shame. "I'm so sorry," I said to the man holding the child. "I should have looked."

"You were all right here," he said.

There was nothing I could say to excuse myself or make it better. He was right. I was right here. I had done nothing. "I'm so sorry."

He left with his child in his arms, and I turned back to face the table, my coffee, my notebook and pen, the rest of the lounge. The women were all staring. The one who'd looked up and then looked away, she said, "His hand was stuck in the door?"

"Yes," I said, still processing the incident. I'm not sure whether I began shaking then or later. "His hand was stuck. He was in pain. And none of us did anything."

"Well, it's not like he was our kid," the woman said. "It wasn't our responsibility."

It wasn't her responsibility.

I had planned to do some more bouldering. I had planned to finish my Morning Pages. I had planned to walk across the street to Pekoe and do some of my day's writing with a pot of their tea, probably Imperial Pu Erh or Monkey-Picked Oolong. But instead I put my street shoes back on, packed up my bookbag, and left. And kept walking until I was home. I was just too ashamed to continue to be out in public. I didn't want the temptation to try to excuse myself to some random person. There was no excuse. I was right there. The child was in distress and pain. I had done nothing. I felt like too much of a worm to be out among decent people.

Besides, on my walk home I started crying and couldn't seem to stop. I was in no shape to face a barista and place an order for tea.

And besides that...

It wasn't HER responsibility. He wasn't HER child.

...I was also just too disgusted with humanity to want to be around other humans.

Times like this, I'm glad of my cats. Cats may be the epitome of selfishness, but at least they don't feel compelled to rationalize their selfishness by defining areas where they're allowed to not give a fuck about other beings' distress. They just do whatever it is they feel like doing. And, you know, they're a lot less selfish than we give them credit for. I've seen Uno nuzzle a crying person, or Null pull himself into their lap, as though specifically to comfort them.

I think I'll go hug my cats now.

It's funny how I collapse in a pile of do-nothings after November is over. Or after other huge looming projects are done -- it doesn't have to be National Novel Writing Month. When the deadline passes, when I've turned in the manuscript, when the thing that has been my life for the past month or so is over, I have a problem finding something else to latch onto.

It's not like I don't have piles of short story drafts and novel drafts in various stages of revision. But I don't know which to turn to, which I was about to get started on before November put the kibosh on that. I've got no plan and can't seem to bring my brain to bear on making a plan.

It doesn't help that yesterday it got so cold that simply leaving the house was dreadful. Supposedly it's better today -- a high of 35 d F predicted, sunny, the bright blue sky earning Boulder its pleasant reputation -- but it's hard contemplating productivity when the best and warmest place to be is in bed under three layers of blankets.

Let me make clear that I'm not posting this as a cry for help. I'm not waiting for someone to email me the answers. Nor am I posting this to excuse myself for living the past part-week in a state of aimless vacation. For once, I'm actually not feeling the urge to mentally beat myself up for it. I'm satisfied with having taken a bit of a rest. Relax-time is necessary after stress-time. Also, we had a house guest -- the wonderful Cate from Boston spent the weekend with us. I've enjoyed the heck out of my time off; there is no guilt involved.

But I did intend to get back to work today, and I'm finding it difficult.

I have a terrible self-absorbed tendency to become fascinated with the workings of my own brain. Right now, my brain is behaving in delightfully strange ways. This blog post is just me taking notes on its interesting activity.

In a similar vein: Reacquainting myself with my (newly repaired) roller skates, as it turns out, has the adorable side-effect of requiring me to become reacquainted with skinned knees. I haven't been a teenager with skinned knees in rather a long time. I'm learning all over again how to live with 'em. This involves everything from kneeling in such a way as to minimize the pain to wishing I had appropriately sized Band-Aids. Also, the inevitable temptation to pick at scabs is a surprisingly succinct life-lesson: Giving in to temptation should always be a conscious and informed decision, one which involves weighing the short-term pleasures against the long-term repercussions. If the decision is to yield, precautions should be taken. Make sure to have triple-antibiotic ointment and big square Band-Aids on hand.

I also need to learn how to patch jeans effectively. It's something I've never been good at, and not for lack of adequate opportunity. The pavement has to shred your jeans before it can skin your knee, after all. This on top of a tendency to wear jeans until the inner thigh seam splits. Thankfully, we have the Internet. It knows everything, and most of its how-to lessons come at no extra charge.

Woo. NaNoWrimo 2011, done and won. Hooray!

Catch is, I'm still not sure what I've written. But that's OK. That's something I can figure out later.

Certain the different short stories that made up each chapter started to come together. Tonight, I was no longer sure what to do with that convergence point... so I went back and continued each of the four individual stories I'd begun before.

Like, where did Hank go when he put the tea cozy on his head and vanished from Earth -- and why wasn't he too worried about this?

Nevertheless, he was a lot less worried than he might have been under the circumstances. For one thing, this wasn't his first time traveling unconventionally. Well, unconventionally from the point of view of someone like Linda and her neighbors. For another, he did have a good idea of what it was he'd put on his head. He remembered visiting the world where it had originated. Or, rather, where the design had originated. The beings that made them weren't big on crochet. They preferred a cloth-making craft that a human would find mostly reminiscent of weaving, and they used a sticky, self-spun fiber that humans would consider akin to spider silk.

Which told him that someone on Earth, or at the very least someone Human, had copied Harbinger technology. This was not comforting to Hank at all. His current position in a gray-red limbo was less disturbing to him than the idea of someone who crocheted having the know-how to make a Harbinger Transport Device. And to decorate it with the constellations familiar to the Harbinger sector -- well, that just screamed smugness, didn't it? (Smugness doesn't "scream," silly. Forget it.) That betokened an engineer who was smugly sure no one would ever catch on to what they were doing.

And Linda just bought it? In some antique store somewhere?

That's the odd thing, Francis -- it's not there anymore.

Oh. One of those. Great. As if there weren't enough troublemakers bouncing around the galaxy.

I suspect Hank is a Time Lord. Dang it. Next time I write Doctor Who fanfic, could I at least know that's what I'm doing before I do it? Stupid bait-and-switch Muse.

Anyway. There's also Maggie and her computer. I still haven't decided what her computer does. It functions impossibly and it does something rather horrible. I just don't know what yet.

Still, I managed at least to follow her away from the shop for a few miles.

Maggie didn't take her new purchase home immediately. She felt terribly possessive of it. It was her secret! So instead of heading back to her house where her little brother would barge into her room -- wasn't that supposed to stop happening once you got out of high school? Only if you also got out of your parents' home, it would appear -- where her parents would want to exchange tales of the day, where she'd get questions about this machine that was hers, all hers! Or, worse, where she'd get waylaid on her way to trying out her new computer. The moment would be lost in a fog of "How was your day" and "have you got homework" and "will you be joining us for dinner tonight."

Besides, she also felt vaguely embarrassed. The shop keeper had charged her a dollar. One hundred pennies. That was all. Maggie had a strange sick clawing feeling in her gut about it. On the surface, it was dread that someone would confront her with having all but stolen the little miraculous computer.

Underneath, where she didn't want to look but still couldn't help but know it was there, she dreaded that the monetary price was only a tiny fraction of what she'd paid.

I'm not sure I want to talk about what happened next with Cathy after the joint started jumping. Or what happened to her boyfriend after Martha-possessed-by-the-Vampire-Dress got her claws in him. FIRST DRAFT FIRST DRAFT SHUT UP oh, well. Here's a fairly harmless excerpt.

More memory flowed back. The shop. That old consignment shop -- but that was a dream, too, right? There hadn't been a shop in that location for years. So where did this memory come from?

"Meet me @ Mimi's."

"What u doin there? Drag queen."

"Get u a prezzie. Or not. Up 2 U."

"Shut up. BRT."

He'd hit SEND. He'd walked into the shop. He knew he'd walked into the shop that didn't exist. Also, he was lying fully clothed on the ground in what appeared to be a filthy alley in one of those big inner cities you see in movies. Gotham. God help him, he was passed out in an alley in Gotham City. He hoped Batman was on his way.

Which just leaves Lucille and her cousin Bitsy. I didn't do anything with them tonight, though. I finished Bitsy's part of the story Monday. It looks sort of final for her, right now.

The whole thing is starkly unfinished, but it's at a point where I can take a step back and think about it as a whole. Which I suppose I'll do very soon now.

But not tonight. Tonight I get to relax. I get to take a break from life for the rest of the night, 'cause I done did it, so I did. Hooray for another successful National Novel Writing Month!

And wait oh hey! I also have a better title for the novel now! Which -- yep -- does in fact change the URL of my novel info page at NaNoWriMo.org. Awkward! Guess I'd better go back a few entries and fix the previous link where the title was still "Selling Dreams and Stealing Hearts." (Dumb title. Why'd I ever call it that? Sheesh.)

Sometimes I am not so smart.

Today is Monday, which means I'd usually be heading to Abbondanza for my weekly volunteer shift. Only, it's also November. As the fall season drifts into winter, the weather gets less predictable. And even when the weather is fine, the farm is slowing down -- getting put to bed, you might say. So I've been getting in the habit of texting the farmer on Sunday just to confirm that I should, in fact, be coming on Monday.

I forgot to text yesterday. Oops.

This morning, I missed the bus by that much -- and it really wasn't necessary. I mean, in the first place, it's not necessary to be late getting out the door. I was up by 6:15 AM, leaving myself plenty of time get dressed, get fed, and even check in on some kitchen processes I started last night.

One process was the fruitcake I finally got around to baking. I left it in the oven to cool overnight, and this morning I boozed up a cheesecloth in brandy, wrapped the cake in the cheesecloth, and sealed up the whole package so it can do its stuff until Winter Solstice. Like I say every year: You Have Been Warned. (In case you're interested: Walnuts, almonds, currants, raisins both golden and not, dates, figs, dried strawberries, diced dried-and-sweetened papaya. I think that's all. Did I mention the brandy?)

The other process was a pot of chicken stock in the slow-cooker. One of this year's end-of-season offerings for Abbondanza's CSA members was a small frozen chicken specifically for making stock. I defrosted it last night in a pot of simmering water and then tossed it and a bunch of vegetables into the slow-cooker last night. This morning I poked at it, decided it had enough water for the rest of the morning, and ate the drumsticks. I can see why it's emphasized that this is a chicken for stock only. It's not particularly plump or tender, this chicken. But eight hours in a crock-pot on low along with carrots, onions, garlic, celery, bay, and "Italian Spices" (I didn't have any thyme on hand) made a yummy couple of bite-sized drumsticks.

Yay kitchen stuff! You bored yet?

Anyway, I had plenty of time to do all that and my Puzzle Pirates blockade schedule besides, and also to clean up after the inevitable mess the cats left me. (Null is not only unable to control his bathroom functions these days, but also he managed to find all the almond slivers I dropped last night. He's a freak for almonds, that cat, and he's not supposed to have them -- too high a concentration of protein for his degenerating kidneys. How do I know he got into them? I cleaned up the barf, that's how I know. Ew.) None of this is responsible for my getting out the door late. No. The real culprit was deciding, "Oh, I have time for a few minutes on Glitch."

And I still would not have missed that bus if, upon the point of departing, upon the point of setting foot to bike pedal, I had not discovered that my wallet was not on my person. It was in the gym bag from yesterday's indoor climbing session. But still I'd have been fine if I'd stopped to think, "You know, this is no emergency. I know exactly where my wallet is. And I don't need it. I've got cash and bus tickets in my book bag. I'm set." But no. Up I run to retrieve the wallet. Down I run to pedal like mad toward the bus stop. And of course I watch the bus pass my stop while I'm still a block away.

The weather was gorgeous. The sunrise was shrouded in a thick cover of puffy pink-and-blue clouds. The wind had calmed down some from its pre-dawn gusting. It was still significant, but mostly it blew my way. And it was warm -- it was supposed to be only 37 degrees in Boulder, but that was while it was still dark. I had to shrug out of my jacket and overshirt 'round about Jay Road. It was a great morning for a bike ride. In fact, I'm half convinced I went back for my wallet because I had a subconscious desire to start my day with a 50-minute bike ride on this beautiful morning.

As I cycled along, I sent a text message to the farmer: "Running a bit late this am. probably there by 8:30. til then!"

I did not realize he'd responded until I got to the stop light in Niwot and pulled out the phone to check the time. "Today is open! No crew and I'm working on tractor."

Oh. OK then!

I turned off Diagonal Highway onto Niwot's Main Street I mean 2nd Avenue, locked up my bike at The Eye Opener, acquired a cup of coffee, and sat me down. Out came the laptop, and here we are.

So this weekend I was not exactly at my brightest as far as planning goes. On the other hand, if I hadn't forgotten to text yesterday, I probably wouldn't have been up and writing before 9 AM, and certainly not in Niwot after a half hour of brisk biking through the tail end of a gorgeous sunrise. I'd have slept in for who knows how long. But I did forget, so I did get up, and that's how these things work sometimes.

More later. Hitting the novel now. I'm still behind schedule and there's only three days left to go!

This'll be short because I'm tired. It's been a long dang Saturday, full of Stuff. Stuff, as you know, is made up of Things. Today's Stuff consisted roughly of two Things, which I update for you as follows:

Thing the First: NaNoWriMo update. Nothing at all written yesterday. Some 2200 words written today. Sticking with the notion that some representative of each of the previous chapters shows up in the current chapter, most of them in response to an ad that Martha's father takes out in the town paper.

Maggie Eirenholdt had blown into town some few months before Lucille but about a year after Ben. She was, she said, on an extended vacation -- at least, that was the story she'd given her family. But the long and the short of it was, she was putting distance between herself and everyone she loved as a defense mechanism, both for herself and them.

"It all went wrong. And it's this thing's fault." Then she alarmed Ben momentarily by pitching the tiny computer against the wall. She put some heft into the throw, too. Any team on any town's recreational softball league would have been proud to have her. The machine hit the wall at about twenty miles an hour then rebounded, skittering, across their table, narrowly missing Ben's coffee by inches. Finally the computer rattled its way into the corner formed by the floor and wall beneath their booth.

"Ouch," Ben said mildly as the machine hit his exposed toes.

Maggie retrieved it. "Sorry. I'm just so angry, and that thing wouldn't break if you took a sack of hammers to it. Sometimes I think that's the only good thing that's come of owning it. I get an indestructable punching bag to vent my frustrations on. Of course," she said, letting her fist fall into a lifeless open palm atop the computer, "I'd have a lot less frustrations to vent if I hadn't bought the thing."

Also, it's no coincidence they're all meeting up in this one town that no one can place on a map, where night mists blow up out of bone-dry days and bring with them crowds of half-heard voices. It's definitly no coincidence the shop showed up here.

Thing the Second: Skating update. This evening I took myself off to the nearest roller skating rink. That would be Skate City in Westminster. Guess what? I still got it. To the extent that I ever had it, I do in fact still have it. There were two reasons I got fooled into thinking I'd lost it somewhere along the way:

1. Skating on city sidewalks is no fun.

Also,

2. My skates appear to be falling apart.

And also,

3. I appear to be falling apart.

And that is all. Good night.

Today's topic: Why Niki Is So Effing Sore Today. (Don't worry -- this story is totally safe for work. All activities were legal and rated G.) It'll probably be a long post, or at least long-ish, so let's go ahead and talk NaNoWriMo briefly.

I'm behind again, but only tolerably so. Returning to my original 2k per day routine will get me to 50K on time. The real question is, what to fill those 2k per day with? I've gotten stuck on Bitsy and Camerie; the old man from the store shows up and drives them to the land of the dead, but what happens there and why it's so important that Bitsy go I'm not sure.

But the thought occured to me that I hadn't yet written a chapter in which someone tries to return an object to the shop. So I started in on that a few days ago. A 20-something computer hacker name of Lucille is waiting around for the shop to appear so she can do just that. She's got illegal access to all sorts of closed circuit monitoring cameras and a fancy battery of programs to automatically spot anomalies in the footage. And she finally gets what she's waiting for. The shop quietly appears during the predawn hours in what had been a blank gray brick wall:

"What do you want to bet," Lucille said to the open air, "that the pawn shop owner will swear this store was here when he moved in?" Or at least that it had been open for years upon years. Lucille knew how these things happened. She'd grown up on the stories of similar miracles. And this was the miracle she'd been waiting for.

She was alone in the room. She got no answer, and she expected none. But her phone did gently vibrate in her right hip pocket. She ignored it, watching the storefront shape itself into existence. She watched the door open. An elderly... person; Lucille could not hazard a guess towards the person's sex... stepped outside with a broom and a watering can. She, or he, calmly watered the flower box. Inside, anonymous green shoots were pushing their way toward the sky. She set the watering can down on the corner of the flower box then set about sweeping the stoop and the sidewalk. There was a stoop now; Lucille cursed herself for not noticing this small transformation. Yes, the person with the broom had to step down, sweeping first the top cement step then the next and then the next. Then they swept the sidewalk with brusque, practiced strokes that said I don't much care where the dust goes so long as it settles somewhere else.

Only once the woman, or man, had gone back inside, only once Lucille were satisfied that no further changes were forthcoming, did Lucille take her phone out and look at the message that had arrived. Anomaly: Camera 62, 04:16 AM. "No shit, Sherlock," Lucille said. Then she flipped the phone open and made a call.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, it's happened. Well, that's for me to know, isn't it? OK, fine, yes, just messing with you. Four-fifteen Davinger Street, right next door to the pawn shop. Yes, I know. Yes. That's the point, isn't it? It wasn't going to be like another frikkin' J. C. Penny's, was it? Right. Put on your wakey face and meet me there."

Lucille snapped the phone closed and held it to her cheek for a moment, thinking hard. Then she slipped it into her right hip pocket. From her left, she drew a small blue ring box. (Her pockets were huge. She liked cargo pants for their capacity.) She flipped open the box and gazed at the ring. It was inlaid all round with a pattern reminiscent of wind currents or perhaps ghosts passing down an empty byway.

"This is for you, Elizabeth," she murmured.

Then she put on her coat and left that place, locking it up behind her as she went.

I wrote that Tuesday. By today, Lucille had become part of a small cabal of people who have all lost family to the shop's questionable merchandise, and the plan is possibly to return the objects all at once together with a little bit of exploding lagniappe tacked on. Maybe. In any case, "Elizabeth" is Bitsy. Whether Camerie is still in the ring, I don't know.

Yesterday's writing introduced Ben Willingham, Martha's father. (Martha was the gal in the first chapter, the one who bought the vampire dress.) Yesterday's writing happened at the Baker Street Pub on 28th Street. And I got a bit of a wild hair. I decide I would rollerskate there. All 1.4 miles of the way.

Like I said on Twitter, this was probably my first time in rollerskates since well before the kids online started deriving terms like "lollerskates" and "lolrus" from the original acronym for laugh out loud. (I suspect "LOL" was already a thing when I last circumnavigated a rollerskating rink, but that the LOLcats phenomenon hadn't yet taken off. The original Happy Cat had not yet begun requesting Cheezburger.) I've ice-skated since, what with Boulder being possessed of a fine seasonal ice rink, but it's been a long while since I had wheels on my feet.

What brought on this sudden nostalgic wild hair? Well, a few weeks ago I got introduced to roller derby.

As you know (Bob), I've been following Havi's blog The Fluent Self. Havi Brooks is one of the most compassionate writers I've ever read on those subjects that bring out the self-loathing in me: procrastination, avoidance, the inability to "just let it go," and so forth. She is on a mission to eradicate, or at least reduce, that toxic societal tendency to find ways to blame people for their own suffering. I took her telecourse "The Art of Embarking" and it was pretty damn magical.

And then I read that she would be in Boulder. Very soon! For the Divide and Conquer Roller Derby Championships. Because she sponsors a roller derby team. So she was going to take the opportunity to teach a Shiva Nata workshop in Boulder.

I cannot explain Shiva Nata better than Havi herself, so go read the "sponsors a roller derby team" link and let her have her say.

It fell off my radar, and by the time I remembered it, it was all sold out. But I emailed myself onto the waiting list, and within hours a spot opened up. So on Thursday the 10th I walked down 30th Street to the Alchemy of Movement dance studio and spent two hours laughing, flailing, laughing some more, and feeling my brain go ping.

Really, that workshop deserves its own post, and this post ain't it. This post is about me getting inspired to dig my skates out of the closet. So. Actually meeting Havi for the first time and then spending two hours deconstructing patterns for their individual parts and putting the parts back together in interesting ways -- that all had an effect. Mainly the effect was to make my brain go "Why not?" at the least provocation. (It also had my brain completely overthinking the lyrics to the sea shanty Havi taught us in the last hour of the workshop. "Who are my 'rolling kings' and what are they 'heaving away' at?" Because that's what Shiva Nata followed by a 15-minute walk does. "Hot buttered epiphanies!" Indeed.)

So when Havi suggested we come out the next day and root for the Rose City Rollers, indeed, my brain went, "Why not?"

Which is how I ended up on a bus to the 1st Bank Center (formerly the Broomfield Event Center) for 2:00 PM on Friday, November 11th.

I watched the first three of the four bouts scheduled that day. It was awesome. I'd never seen roller derby before. I know this much about it: it involved women on skates, it involved physical contact, and, if Jim Croce was to be trusted, it involved an asthetic skewed less toward lingerie and more towards "built like a 'frigerator with a head." Apparently I was wrong in thinking lingerie would be entirely uninvolved; many participants wear fishnet stockings. But other than the occasional mention of a product for keeping your hiney shiny (what is this I don't even), the play-by-play announcers made no mention of body parts except when describing whose elbow slammed into whose side and who got a forearm penalty and who had just demonstrated phenomennal agility on their feet.

By the time the Rose City Rollers came out to play, Havi had invited me via Twitter to come find her, so I got to root for her team right alongside her and pester her with my newbie questions. "So, how exactly does one score points?" "What does the stripe on that one gal's helmet mean?" "What's up with the lines on the ground?" She was exceedingly patient. She was also totally rocking the purple wig and rainbow boa constrictor plushie.

Watching roller derby also had the effect of sending me on a trip down memory lane. Anyone remember the roller rink Phil's Big 8 in Metairie? Right under the clover-leaf ramp from Causeway onto Jefferson Highway? I went to so very many birthday parties there. I participated in all the floor games and won my share of free Cokes off the two-lap races. For the longest time, I thought the J. Geils Band song was called "Free Skate" because the DJ so often played it upon reopening the floor. During the free skates, I would zip through the crowd, zig left, zag right, and imagine myself in some competitive event in which I'd have to take down my opponents by clashing my wheels with theirs.

And there were these skates in my closet that I hadn't worn for at least a decade. Well... why not?

(I mentioned to Havi, "Watching this makes me think, 'Dude, I could do that!'" She said, "You totally should!" Then she introduced me to Juno, who was sitting next to her on her other side, and Juno introduced me to the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls Derby Days. As soon as NaNoWriMo is over, I am so there. My roller derby name will be "Fleur de Beast." Mwahaha.)

So this is why yesterday I got the bright idea to put on my skates. For, as I say, the first time in more than a decade. And to attempt to skate the 1.4 miles from my house to the Baker Street Pub. I was unreasonably optimistic.

I had this vision of me whizzing down 30th in the bike lane, texting to Twitter as I went: "Hee. I'm on my lollerskates. :)" NOT HARDLY. Being a decade out of practice doesn't just mean my endurance was no longer up to speed. My balance was also out of whack. It didn't help that I'd probably never skated with a backpack on before. There was no question of doing anything with my cell phone while skating. I windmilled and jerked and whoopsied my way down 30th, falling down at least three times and acquiring a gorgeous pre-adolescent-style skinned knee on the way, before putting my shoes back on at maybe the half mile point. It was a disappointing experience. I walked the rest of the way to the write-in in a bit of a funk.

But I couldn't help but notice that the newer sidewalk that starts around the big Barnes & Noble at 30th and Pearl and continues on past Walnut was so very wide and smooth...

On my way back home, I sat down on a parking spot bump in front of Karlequin's Game Knight and I put my skates back on. And I kept them on all the way home from there. I didn't fall down again, either.

It's starting to come back to me.

But that's why Niki's really, really sore today. Ow.

While I've been nattering on about NaNoWriMo, I've failed to blog another development: Another short story of mine will soon see print.

This isn't a pro-sale, or in fact a sale at all. But I'm pleased with it. Anything that hauls a piece of fiction out of the rewrite queue and delivers it into the slush is a slice of the positive, in my opinion. And it was a happy thing to dive into this particular slush pile.

I graduated from the University of Washington back in... well. My final quarter was Fall 1996, but I officially took the walk in Spring 1997. I did my time in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, starting with an impressive handful of AP credits and attending classes straight through the summers. So I graduated "Class of I Haven't Got A Clue, Random Mid-90s, How's That?" with a BA in English, concentration in Creative Writing, with honors. This required that I present an Honors Thesis to my Advisor (the most awesome Shawn Wong, who had just published American Knees at the time). My Honors Thesis consisted of pretty much every piece of fiction or poetry I'd created during my time at the University of Washington, presented for critique, revised and rewritten and polished until sparkly.

As you might guess, it was full of weird stuff. "And on the Seventh Day," a story inspired by misreading "an angel waking up a man" as "an angel waking up as a man." "Out from Under," a bit of wanna-be magic realism inspired 90% by resentment at my ex-boyfriend and 10% by grudging acknowledgment that I wasn't exactly perfect myself. "The Goddess Factor," a bit of science fiction inspired by the then-new idea of DNA computing. And so forth. The whole compendium I called Songs About Fallen Angels.

I have been reliably informed, by a recent UW graduate whom I met at Sirens 2011, that I would never have been able to graduate on that today. The UW English Department, I'm told, will not even consider an application whose writing sample has a whiff of the spec-fic.

This floors me. In my time, I encountered absolutely no genre-unfriendliness, neither from classmates nor from teaching assistants nor from professors. The closest I experienced to genre-unfriendliness was a TA critiquing the narrative style of "The Children of Ghosts," which was admittedly written from fresh fannish squee for Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy. He didn't mind that I was using an anacronistic high fantasy style; he minded that I was doing it badly.

But today, I'm told, times have changed. The UW English Department no longer stands as an exception to the dearth of welcome SF/F/H finds in academia. And a recent handful of English graduates -- my Sirens informer included -- decided to do something about it. They started a new literary journal, one dedicated to speculative fiction in all its glory. It's called AU, and its next issue will include my Viable Paradise "Hats of War!" story, "The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out."

Or so I'm told. In any case, I just emailed my revised draft to the editors this morning. Hopefully this new rewrite didn't change it from something they liked into something they liked less. We shall see.

In any case, I'm ecstatic to hear that something like AU exists, and I want it to go on existing for a long, long time. I submitted a story to it because 1) the theme was "Invasion," a perfect match for "Worms," and 2) because, hearing about AU at Sirens, I immediately wanted to support it, and submitting a story seemed a logical way to do that. I only wish something like AU had been around when I was still an undergrad.

Hooray for acedemic support for speculative fiction! More like that, please!

Been continuing along on the novel at an average sort of pace. Haven't done any more multi-thousand-word heroics since Saturday's 5K, but I've kept my stats graph right on the diagonal line. See for yourself!

(Note: It would appear that the current incarnation of the NaNoWriMo website uses one's novel title as a building block of one's stats URL. Thus: NaNoWriMo.org/[2-letter Language Code]/participants/[Username]/novels/[Novel Title]/stats. So when I finally come up with a better title, that URL might change. Unlike here at actually writing blog, where each work in progress gets its own unchanging 8-letter code, and changes to titles simply cause confusion on earlier blog posts where I refer in the text to the crappy working title but the blue word-count block shows the sparkly new right title, which may yet change again in some future time and cause more confusion. AND SO FORTH.)

I'm still working on Chapter 4, otherwise known as Bitsy and Her Sister's Ghost. Also, I've begun reading the archives of Mimi Smartypants. This is a blog full of the snark. It makes me chortle. But it also makes me feel kind of stupid. See, Mimi often talks about her daughter Nora, and Nora at eight sounds a lot more sophisticated than the voice I've given Bitsy to talk about her ninth birthday party in.

(Erm. So. You click on that link, and then you scroll past Mimi's gynecological musings -- hee! socks -- and finally you get to the Nora bit at #9 and following.)

It's not that I don't remember what it was like to be eight. I just forget which memories went with which number of years old. Ask me about third grade and I will reel off all sorts of memories. I will tell you what games we played at recess, who was in my home room, who I had a crush on, what books I read in the library, what field trips we took, what I did in the afternoons, and what kind of fights I had with my parents. I'll tell you about the cold fusion exhibit we got all fruitlessly exited about. I'll tell you about schmoozing my way into a Haley's Comet camping trip and it being too overcast to see the actual comet. (That might have been fourth grade rather than third. Same home room though.) I'll probably also tell you, because I have no freakin' filters, all sorts of other things I remember doing that were so stupid and embarrassing that when I think of them today I start humming reflexively as a sort of mental LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. But ask me about being eight years old, and before I tell you all that stuff, I'll have to go, "Wait. When was that? Let's see... eight minus five is... Oh! I was in 3rd grade. That was the year that..." Only then can the nostalgic brain dump from 1984 commence.

And you will undoubtedly smile in a pained sort of way and look for a good excuse to exit the conversation before I really got going.

All this is just to say, I know I've written Bitsy too young. But I don't realize it on autopilot. I wanted the point of view of a small, scared, unsophisticated child, and I picked an arbitrary single digit. Which turned out to be the wrong digit. Only now I've gotten attached both to Bitsy's voice and to all sorts of things that depend on nine being the right digit after all. Crap.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do to resolve this conflict, but I know when I'm going do it: Not in November. First draft, peeps. First draft.

"But even though that monster let her through, she ran into more monsters and every single one of them wanted something. The lady gave away her pretty robes and her sparkly dancing shoes and her beauty and her hair and her voice and everything. Now she was nobody. That's what it takes to go into the land of the dead. You have to stop being your alive self."

Bitsy felt cold and all numb with scared. She knew now that Camerie was taking her to the land of the dead. Camerie had to go. She'd been a ghost for more than nine years, and ghosts have to go away sooner or later. Being in Bitsy's body didn't matter -- it just meant Camerie would walk there instead of blow away. Bitsy didn't want Camerie to go there. Bitsy really didn't want to go there herself. Bitsy didn't want to stop being Bitsy.

"Finally the lady who used to be a queen ended up in front of the throne of the queen of the dead. That was her sister. But the alive queen had given away her crown and her clothes and her face and her self and everything. So the dead queen didn't recognize her. She just said, 'Someone living has come to visit me. And I'm hungry!' Dead people are always hungry. 'So hang this person on a hook and we'll eat her up!' So that's what the court of the dead did. They tapped the living queen on her head, and she wasn't alive anymore. Then they hung her up on a hook in a cold meat locker. Then they got ready to carve her up and eat her."

Bitsy couldn't keep quiet anymore. Is that what's going to happen to me when we get to the land of the dead?

"Don't be stupid. We're not going to the land of the dead."

Then where are we going?

Camerie got mad again. "Don't ask that! Stop asking questions! Shut up!" She started running again.

It's been a good few days on the novel. I've been slacking off with the blogging of it, but not with the actual writing. I've discovered that if I spend two hours alternating 15-minute word sprints and 15-minute rests, I generate between 3,000 and 3,200 words. So that's what I did on Thursday. I did it again today. And since @NaNoWordSprints challenged everyone to have a #5Kday, I kept going. In pure word count terms, I am all caught up.

In story terms, things keep happening unexpectedly. Which is kind of fun and kind of nervous-making.

Driving to the airport the other night, I saw what looked like the tattered remains of a garbage bag rise up on the wind, whip around a bit, then sink down again. And I thought, "Ah, ghosts on the side of the road." And I continued thinking, "Imagine if that were a normal sight. Ghosts on the side of the road. Just part of the acknowledged world. You'd have to learn about it in driver's ed, along with other unexpected things you have to be able to handle as a driver. Wildlife, inclement weather, ghosts. And are the ghosts going somewhere or are they waiting to get picked up?"

So I had my next chapter. It was about time I set a chapter in a world whose reality wasn't quite like ours. In this chapter, a little girl acquires a costume ring from a gumball machine in that shop, and it lets her interact with a very particular ghost.

Bitsy was bad. She went where she oughtn't. But it's not her fault! She just forgot. She forgets things sometimes. Momma tells her, Don't you go in that store. Don't you go in there. Bad things for sale in there. Bad things a little girl shouldn't see. Bitsy is a very little girl -- she's eight and three quarters precisely. Any littler and she'd be a baby. Bitsy's too little to see the bad things on the shelves, because they're way up high where Momma would have to lift her. Pa used to lift her up high, way too high, and Bitsy would scream and scream, but Momma knows how to lift Bitsy up safe and sound so she can take down her ghoulie-bear or see the family picture of herself and Momma and Pa and her old big sister Camerie who lives on the side of the road. Bitsy wants to go visit her. Pa took her once, but it was so long ago Bitsy's forgot. Pa says Bitsy was very brave and didn't cry or try to run away, that Bitsy tried to hug Camerie, and Camerie, who was singing and singing Oooooo ah oooo, stopped singing and got so startled she shrank down to the size of a mouse and blew away. Bitsy knows that's how it happened because Pa only tells true stories, but Bitsy's forgot it all. That's why she wants to see Camerie now. She forgot what her old big sister was like.

Bitsy forgot about the store, too, about Momma saying no no no, she was so set on visiting Camerie all by herself. Since she's so little, it took her about two times forever to get halfway there, following the sidewalk and then turning left because Bitsy isn't supposed to cross the street by herself, then following the sidewalk under the great big highway. Bitsy isn't sure if that's crossing the street or not. Is crossing under the same as crossing, period? Camerie crossed under, long before Bitsy was born -- a whole year, Momma said.

The store's another forever along the sidewalk, right about when Bitsy's getting confused about where Camerie lives. The store's got dirty windows Bitsy couldn't've seen inside even if she weren't so little, and when she runs her hand along the reddy brown wood its walls are made of, she gets a splinter. It's not the kind of splinter that hurts. It just sticks out like a little tree that got blown over in the wind. Bitsy's still staring at it inside the store, because there isn't much other than that for a little girl to see in the store, what with all the shelves being way up high, and the splinter is interesting the way it sticks out of her hand.

And the chapter just kept going. I've been writing on it for three days, and the chapter's word count is 9,549. I think I may have stumbled across an entire novel here.

NaNoWriMo feels very self-indulgent. This year especially. It's not the first time I've started the month with no clue where I was going, but it's the first time that the shape of a novel hasn't arisen quickly and naturally. I mean, the year I drafted Like a Bad Penny, all I had to go on were two men coming out of a bagel shop, but before two days were out I knew what the novel would look like. This? I continue to explore. And constantly working day after day on something that doesn't guarantee to become potentially publishable, that's what feels so self-indulgent. Like, I can't really justify it to myself. It feels like writing, but is it productive? I don't know.

So I keep reminding myself, "It's NaNoWriMo. It's supposed to be self-indulgent. It's your chance to make unexpected things happen."

John and I were talking finances the other day. As is often the case, I mentioned feeling a bit like a slacker because I wasn't working as hard as I felt I should, producing as many stories as I knew I could, or doing as much "day job writing" as I felt I ought. And John said something that kind of blew my mind. He said, "Well, I often feel like I'm not the force for good in this world that I ought to be. But by supporting you, giving you time to not only write but volunteer and stuff like that, I feel like I am making the world a better place after all."

And that sort of hit me right in the teary-eyed spot. I'm sure if I thought too hard about what John said, I could convince myself to feel terribly pressured about it, like I needed to produce enough positive change in the world to justify two people's existence instead of just one, so work HARDER work MORE stop SLACKING... but right now, what I mostly feel is affirmed. Like a great big permission slip just got handed to me, and I can believe in it.

So noodling around in November, following this or that clue through my imagination in search of a story with no guarantee of what I'll find -- that's OK. It's part of the process. It does, eventually, lead to story. And it's true to that good old Shel Silverstein motto of Put Something In: "Put something silly in the world / That ain't been there before." I think as long as, whatever I do with my days, I take Put Something In as my guide beacon, I'm headed in the right direction.