author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hello, the blog. Long time no update. Which is silly, because I have been writing. I've just also been playing a lot too. That's the thing: You finish writing for the day, what do you do next? Do you A) write some more, or B) go play the computer game that best matches the current levels of exhaustion in your brain? I seem to be more of a B gal there.

By the way: Spiral Knights, Puzzle Pirates, or Plants Vs. Zombies (or maybe Glitch except Glitch has sort of turned into just clickety busywork for me these days) in order from "kinda tired but happy" to "totally pooped and don't wanna work that hard for my playtime." Also, roller derby practice is getting to be a weekly thing, and might go semiweekly very soon now. Neat trick, discovering new ultra-physical sports at age 35. My knees seem to be adjusting to the new demands, which is good, as I'm not smitten with the idea of getting new knees. I hear that's very expensive and painful and packs a long recovery time and has to be done all over again after ten years or so. So the longer my original knees will let me skate on 'em, the happier I'll be.

But today I find myself with a sufficient combination of energy and blogger's guilt to do a catch-up post. Look! Here it comes now.

I've written one very short story a week every week for the past five weeks, and yes, I am feeling bad-ass about it. This is thanks to a contest being run over at Codex, the "neo-pro" writing group I joined not very long ago. Fridays, the contest admin posts prompts. A 750-word (max) story is due by Monday morning at 2 AM Mountain Time. During the weekdays that follow, forum members vote on 'em. Only once you've voted do you get to see who wrote what -- but then you only get to see the pseudonym each contestant took on for the contest. Now that the Week 5 stories are being voted on, we get to guess who's behind each 'nym. Not that I'm going to be able to guess. I'm too new to the group to know other members' writing styles. Instead, I'll be getting an idea of people's styles from the stories once their authorship is revealed. Anyway, I successfully competed in each of the five weeks, so that's five brand new stories that I can start submitting to paying markets. Once I give them a bit of a revise, that is.

Now, this weekend we get to play a mega bonus round. Same timing, but the story has to be between 2000 and 7500 words. I predict that I will be very busy this weekend. In addition to other reasons I was already going to be busy this weekend. Yeesh!

So that's the happy productive news on the short fiction front. On the longer works front, I've finally decided which of my NaNoWriMo drafts will be the first to actually get circulated to agents etc., and therefore should be receiving my full attention for the coming months. Really decided, I mean. I pulled out a new notebook and put its title on the front and everything. But more about that tomorrow...

...which means I'd better update this blog tomorrow, right? Dailiness. One day's hardly over before the next one's begun. What's up with that?

It was around 5:30 PM on Tuesday when I spoke to Dell Technical Support about my non-functioning speakers.

It was around 8:00 AM on Wednesday when the technician who'd visited me Tuesday called up and offered to return between 10 and 11 that very day. And so he did. And though he did not need to install the replacement speakers after all (as expected and hoped), he did indeed have them with him, freshly overnighted from Dell HQ.

Does your math tell you what my math tells me? My math tells me this is barely more than 12-hour turn-around time. I'm not sure how this is physically possible, even under the rubric of "overnight delivery." What I'm trying to say is, I should like to borrow Dell's TARDIS, please.

So, yes, when the tech installed the new motherboard on Tuesday (which continues to perform splendidly, thanks), he'd just managed not to securely plug my external speakers into it. On Wednesday, he opened up the computer again to correct this. It was a matter of five to ten minutes.

"Awesome," was my take on it. "As mistakes go, this one's a lot easier to fix than the one that results in yet another flawed motherboard."

"Well, that one would be easy, too," he said. "I'd just install another motherboard."

"Yeah, but -- how depressing would that be? Another flawed motherboard. Ew. I'm glad it wasn't that."

He pointed out that maybe his employer wouldn't feel the same way. A flawed motherboard would mean someone else had made the mistake, someone that employer didn't have to answer for. I guess field warranty support contractors expect their techs to be perfect. But that's silly -- not to mention deeply unfair. It's not perfection that's obtainable but rather the striving for perfection. Any company policy that expects employers not to make mistakes is a policy that expects employers not to be human. Seems much more practical, more effective, and more humane to focus instead on how to respond to the inevitable mistake that does crop up. And I've got no complaints whatsoever in that department. No one dragged their feet, no one tried to weasel out of the warranty, no one tried to evade responsibility. Everyone concerned had the same goal: me with a functional laptop. I'm happy to say that goal has been achieved. Hooray!

Tangent: While the speaker fix was simple, the tech's visit was a bit longer than planned because an unrelated part of the motherboard decided to give him problems. If you've ever taken apart a Dell Inspiron 1564 -- and why should you? But if you have -- you'll be familiar with the ribbon cable that attaches the power button to the motherboard such that pushing it actually has an effect. It's teeny and fiddly, and so is the plastic clamp that secures it in place. When that plastic clamp pops off, it can be very tricky to pop it back on. He had to use his entire set of pliers and my own pair of needle-nosers AND the tweezers from my Swiss Army pocketknife, in various combinations, before the thing finally decided to cooperate. Then he cloth-taped that sucker into place so there'd be no more of that nonsense.

So now my laptop is stable, functional, and ready for me to move both my working life and my playtime back in. I can now go on with my life.

(Yes, I'm aware of how pathetic that is. Possibly my life needs an overhaul if a broken laptop can bring it to a screeching halt. First world problems ahoy! Still.)

In other posts I've mused on how stress is habit forming. It totally is. And there are different flavors of stress. Right now, I find I'm in the habit of stressing out over the possibility that my laptop will crash if I pick it up, adjust the angle of its monitor, or just shove it farther away from me on the desk. It's downright Pavlovian. Either a week with John's perfectly stable Inspiron 1440 wasn't enough to put me at ease, or being back at the keyboard of my 1564 is evoking stress once more. My guess? A bit of each. Give me time; I'll get back into the habit of taking functionality for granted eventually.

On the other hand, I managed to get almost two years of productivity out of a cracked motherboard. Go me!

So. Laptops. Today my entire brain is taken up with laptops. Well, and writing a little bit, but mostly laptops: the care and feeding thereof, the backing up of their contents, the getting of technical support when things go wrong.

Mostly it's the tech support angle, with a side-order of backing up.

I have this love-hate relationship with Dell. I'm on my second Dell Inspiron, and I keep swearing it'll be my last because both of them had problems. My previous one, a 1505e, had hinges that constantly loosened and a CD/DVD-ROM tray that repeatedly broke. My current Inspiron, a 1564, had serious instability right from the time I got it in April of 2010. This was frustrating because, darn it, the laptop was new. I was not ready to deal.

So I disabled the internal USB hub that ran the webcam that seemed intimately related to the Blue Screen of Death memory dump crashes that happened sometimes when I adjusted the angle of the monitor (but if the webcam was running, it happened every time), and that managed things until about October of last year. And even then, when simply moving the silly thing risked a shut down (now in three different flavors! Red Raspberry Restart! Blue Raspberry Restart! And Black-Out Licorice!), I put it off. And I kept putting it off even though sometimes it shut down without my moving it at all.

There was NaNoWriMo to deal with, after all. And then in December there were all those things I had let pile up during NaNoWriMo. I'm a writer. I live on my laptop. Even when I'm not writing, I'm attached to the machine. The thought of backing up all the crap and living without my computer for a couple of weeks was a painful one. And I didn't even want to think about having to recreate all my settings from scratch if an OS reinstall.

In the first week of January, the dang thing crashed during startup. Not the first time it had done this, but then it crashed again. And then it didn't want to start up for several tries. SCARY. It was time to take this problem seriously.

But, see, here's the "love" part of the love-hate relationship. Besides being powerful little machines that will do pretty much anything I'd ask of a desktop computer while being perfectly portable, they come from a company who make tech support practically painless. I tend to forget the practically painless part when I'm dreading making the call, but it's true. If you are in the market for a Dell, and you're trying to decide whether to buy the warranty extension, buy that sucker. I mean, if you can afford it. It does add a couple hundred to the price tag. But oh, the headaches it will save you. Also the money. I got the 3-year extension. A laptop is an investment, and I want it to last.

So. I explained the various permutations of my Inspiron's instability to a tech support specialist over live chat. "Overheats far too easily," I said. "Shuts down quasi-randomly." And so forth. And the tech support specialist did what they'd done twice for my previous Inspiron: they had a FedEx box shipped to my door so I could ship the ailing machine to their repair depot, all free of charge.

Thankfully, around the same time I got the 1564, John got a Dell Inspiron 1440, and he never uses it because he's always using his work computer instead. (Watching how well that thing runs is an effective advertisement for Asus. I have laptop envy.) So I set up a profile, made myself comfortable on it, and ported everything over.

The box arrived two days later. The following day I shipped it back, Intel Inside. Included with the machine was a meticulously filled-out form describing all the permutations of my problem and how to reasonably expect to replicate it. This is an important plot point.

Several days later I received an email that said FedEx had delivered it. The next day, that it had arrived in the repair depot and work would begin.

The day after that, that it had been shipped back to me.

"Hmm," I said, "that was suspiciously quick."

Two days later, the box arrived. I opened it up. I eyeballed the memo stating that the only corrective action taken was to reinstall Windows. I said "Hmm" again and turned the machine on.

I picked it up while it was booting. Blip! Out go the lights.

Given the ease with which I caused all three flavors of computer crash within about five minutes, I can only assume the folks at the repair depot didn't actually read those meticulous error-replication instructions. Maybe my handwriting is worse than I thought? Maybe they saw that I checked "random" and didn't notice that I'd also checked "replicable."

So this was obnoxious and caused me to consider changing my opinion of Dell Technical Support for the first time in about five years. But I called the phone number listed in case "for any reason the portable does not operate to your satisfaction upon receipt," and despite that it was midnight Mountain Time, a cheerful receptionist took down my data and pulled up my file. (My opinion started going back up again.)

After I told her my frustrations and ran some diagnostics to her specifications, she talked to a manager and told me that, seeing as how the reinstallation of Windows didn't help, it must be a hardware issue. ("I know!" I did not say. "That's what I've been saying all along!" I further bit my tongue on.) Therefore they would have an on-site technician replace my motherboard, hard drive, heat sink, and fan.

"Oh, that's fantastic! Wait -- 'on-site' -- you can't seriously mean at my site, can you?"

"Yes, ma'am. A technician will come to you."

Should I be as impressed as I am about this? I was, and still am, seriously impressed. That was late Friday night when we spoke, and today a technician did indeed visit and replace the specified hardware. I got to watch him take the thing to pieces, and I got to make a go at cleaning out the keyboard while it was detached, and I got to ask him questions about the process, and and and basically I got to feel more or leass involved in at least the head-space of whatever was happening to my computer.

Not to mention all the exchanging of pet stories (apropos of my cats hanging around) and Rush concert stories (apropos of my Snakes and Arrows tee), because I'm a proud member of various geek tribes and I love having fellow tribe members come visit.

Unfortunately, he was on a tight schedule and couldn't stick around for the First Time Running Windows Setup rigmarole. But he did stay long enough to watch me picked up the laptop and swing it upside down and mess with its lid and tap on the hinges ...and utterly fail to cause a shut-down. From this he determined the hard drive didn't need replacing after all, so he packed up his box of electronics and headed out. "You probably had a miniscule crack in the motherboard right from the factory," he said, "which just got worse every time it heated up and cooled down."

I thanked him profusely, waved goodbye, and set about setting up Windows.

About an hour later, I discovered my external speakers weren't functioning.

*facepalm*

This whole saga has been like a game of Good News Bad News. "Good news! Your warranty is good until April 2013! Bad news! You have to invoke it! Good news! A tech will come to your actual house and replace hardware at your kitchen table! Bad news! Now your speakers don't work! Good news! An on-site tech will be with you in a couple of days to replace your speakers or maybe just re-attach your current speaker's cables, because, awesome as today's tech was, he may have forgot to do this, probably because you wouldn't stop talking the whole time he was working, you nerd! How easy is that?!"

All in all, the balance is on the good news side. Live with computers and, sooner or later, you'll need computer repair. Maybe you'll need it on day 366; maybe you'll need it on day 1. At least the warranty is comprehensive and the people backing it are going the extra mile. And, being the fallible humans that they are, maybe Dell Technical Support won't fix everything on the first try -- but they'll fix it on the next try, or the one after that. Whatever it takes.

It's exhausting to finally come around to making the complaint, but I can't honestly complain -- or at least I can't lastingly complain -- about their complaint department.

So. Um. Bram Stoker Award Reading List. ...Eeek?

Back up back up back. The story starts here:

New Year's Eve, blogger Diane Dooley starts a thread on the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums soliciting AW authors to interview about their recent or very-soon-now publications. (The first interview is already up. Go read it! Then, go read Lavender Ironside's The Sekhmet Bed.) So I sidle in and I'm all, "Just novelists, or would you be interested in hearing from authors with sorta-recent short story releases?" You know, blinking innocently and giving my most winning grin. Or the internet equivalent thereof.

She very kindly shoots me a private message to talk about that. In the course of which, she asks me, "Weren't you just long-listed for the Stoker?"

*Blink blink blink* I -- what? No no no no. Surely not. Surely we must be thinking of someone else here. I thank her for the kind spot of confusion, but I concede that Blood and Other Cravings has indeed received some nice reviews, some of them making flattering mention of my story. (Also, one of those stories -- Margo Lanagan's "Mulberry Boys" -- is going into The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four. Ellen just announced the table of contents today.)

Oh, by the way, since we're talking about reviews, and since I was reading a lively discussion about Amazon.com reviews and the tragic tendency to commit the ABM: This evening I decided, what the heck. I toddled on over to Amazon.com, looked up Blood and Other Cravings, and I read the reviews. Then I nodded to myself. "All right," says I, "I've got that out of my system and need never do it again." It's not like I've been avoiding reading the reviews of the anthology. It's not even like any reviews, including those at Amazon, have been less than mildly favorable. It's just that Amazon.com makes it so easy to give into temptation and snap off a quick reply that it's best for an author to just never go there. I hope that when I have a novel of my own out, I remember this decision and stick to it.

Anyway, Dooley wrote me back, saying as how she did make a slight oopsie. In fact it was the Bram Stoker Award Reading List she saw me on. (The list was just released Monday.)

My response was basically to drop my jaw and fall over on the floor, temporarily dead. When I picked myself back up, I communicated this to Dooley, along with my appreciation for letting me know.

So, this reading list is not, N O T not, a long list for the awards. Nor is it the guaranteed source of all of the 2011 Stoker nominees. What it is, is a way for the Horror Writers Association to draw attention to what they feel is some of the best horror fiction of the year. Yes, this is partially for the benefit of those who do select Stoker nominees ("You might find these worthy of your consideration"), but it's also for the benefit of the general public ("Go read this stuff! It's good stuff!").

Out of the 85 titles listed in the short fiction catgory, seven of them are from Blood and Other Cravings. And one of those seven titles is "First Breath."

It's an honor.

...And now it would appear I've a lot of horror reading to do.

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.