author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Once upon a long, long time ago, like... oh, say, 1992? Anyway, I wrote a story. And no, you cannot read it, because it was embarrassingly full of the Mary Sue.

Surely you've met the Mary Sue? Oh, Mary Sue is wonderful! She's perfect! She's sexy and adorable and everyone loves her. And yet they can never really know her, not truly, not in all her mystical, magical splendor. She is not from this world, you see, she was always destined to leave it and go home again...

In short, it was one of those stories that teenagers write about the storybook character they kind of sort of wish they could be. And also nobody understands them.

Hey, I have a lot of compassion for Teenage Me. But at the same time, I have to admit, she was not immune to the allure of the cuckoo child story: "Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day, the King and Queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever."

But, being a teenager, I lacked sufficient awareness to prevent me from showing this story to Mom. This story in which a much misunderstood woman went back to her real home and her real parents. I kind of wish I could go back in time and slap myself. "Hey! Hey, you! You do not put this story in front of your adoptive parents. What exactly are they going to think you think of them, huh?"

But, happily, Mom didn't pick up on the vibe of "You're not my REAL mommy!" Or if she did, she never mentioned it. No, what stuck with her was the very dramatic conclusion of the story in which the protagonist's return to her home world also had something to do with Lake Pontchartrain leaping its levee boundaries and flooding the city.

Something like the following year or maybe the year after that, New Orleans had a particularly nasty brush with Maybe This One's Gonna Be the Big One. There was a heck of a lot of flash flooding. (This was at least ten years before Hurricane Katrina.) And Mom said to me, only half joking, "Niki, you write things and they come true! Stop it!"

Well. About that.

These days I find myself writing a lot of stories about snow. And they are not happy winter wonderland stories. There's the one about the midsummer week snowstorm that turns out to precursor Ragnarok. There's the one about the snow-glue disaster from outer space. And now there's "Caroline's Wake," a reimagining of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which of course the death of the Persephone character ushers in a particularly vicious snowstorm.

You might think it's an obsession or something. But, look, I live in Colorado right now. It snows here.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on when TWO FRICKIN' INCHES OF SNOW DUMP ON THE FRONT RANGE IN THE SECOND WEEKEND OF MAY.

And I can hear my mother saying, "Stop writing about things that come true!"

If I still had that overinflated teenage opinion of myself, I might get worried about this sort of thing. But, really, think about it--if there's a writer out there who's making things happen by writing about it (and I have a novel that I drafted about that, by the way), why would it be me? Why wouldn't it be a much better writer, someone much farther along their path to greatness, someone who's got lots of stuff published and a shelf full of awards? Why, to be precise, didn't Connie Willis usher in the snowpocalypse with her novella "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know"? That would have been just fine. Her snowpocalypse was temporary, lasting just long enough to catalyze a sense of, depending on the character, wonder or forgiveness or love rekindled.

Guess what? Connie Willis is in Colorado too! Where, as I mentioned, it snows.

Writers are not unaware of the world around them. When they live places where hurricanes and flooding are a yearly danger, they think about floodtastrophes. When they live where the winter gets snowy and they don't like it much, thank you, they write about snowpocalypses. And if it snows in May in Boulder or flash-floods in August in Metairie, well, are you surprised? We all know that stuff happens. We know it's a hazard of our territory. It's on our minds.

And stuff that's on writers' minds tends to show up in writers' fiction. That's pretty much it.

So if it snows again in two weeks DON'T BLAME ME, OK?! I'm not predicting, I'm just complaining.

OK, so, that feeling? That awful "I have no idea how to write the next scene" feeling? The one that doesn't get better even after hours of preparatory freewriting? That feeling is not a valid reason not to write the next scene.

In fact, that feeling is a clear signal that it's time to write the next scene.

Seriously, feeling like "I don't know how to write it" doesn't get better by not writing. It doesn't turn into certainty and optimism just by thinking about the scene some more. It's a sign that I've hit the end of the usefulness of thinking, and I need to put words on the page to find out what the words are.

One of these days, I'll start remembering that right from the start. And the sooner the better. Because this painful process that involves several weeks of "I don't know how to write the next bit" followed by a day where I finally take a stab at writing it and arrive at epiphany thereby, well, it could stand to lose a few weeks off the front.

In other news, jigsaw sudoku is evil and should not be contemplated until after the work day is over.

You might think a freakish May snow storm would preclude much farm work. This is not the case. We just moved the farm work inside. Seedling thinning continued from last week, only the thinning party (or thinning bee, if you will) took place inside the greenhouse, where it was hot enough to make me regret my extra layers of clothing.

Plants I worked with today: Lettuce, fennel, marjoram, sage, several varieties of tobacco, and, very briefly, more peppers.

My favorite of the above was the fennel. Some people hate all things licorice-flavored; I love them. Fennel, anise, ouzo, absinthe, black jelly beans and Jujyfruits, Good & Plenty, Allsorts, salted, even Twizzlers if you must. Thinning fennel was like kicking back with a freshly opened bag of Haribo licorice wheels. Every third or fourth stalk that I snipped went into my mouth.

Eventually, later on this summer, the fennel will be all grown up and harvested and ready to eat. At that time, my favorite thing is to quarter the stalks, salt them and pepper them, sautee them in butter, and coat them in Parmesan cheese. Goes well with potatoes or a really flavorful rice.

I did not come home and nap. I came home and got stuff done. I did all my household accounting chores as well as a few more tasks that have been languishing. I even popped the bearings out of my outdoor wheels and cleaned them. I should have done that Saturday evening immediately after all that skate-dancing around at the New Brew Fest and, more to the point, walking through wet grass between the dance floor and the Boulder County Bombers promotional booth. Hopefully the three-day wait won't result in noticeable rust spots.

And now, having been virtuously productive all afternoon, I'm just hanging out at home having a relaxing evening. I have a lot of work to do tomorrow, writing-wise, but I'll worry about that when tomorrow gets here.

You know what I just realized? About March 16? It's in one week. And I'm still stuck freewriting my way into the scene with the titular wake. Like, "Who's there, what sounds do you hear, what stories are they telling about the deceased? 25 minutes. Go."

I may end up having to put in some Saturday hours.

Argh, damn and blast. I temporarily delayed work on other things in order to enter Shock Totem's flash fiction contest for May. They released the photo prompt on May 2 and we had until midnight the night of May 7 to submit an entry. Well, I procrastinated all week, and I procrastinated all day, and I finally finished it at 10:15 or so here in Mountain time--

--and the dang contest closed at midnight Eastern time. Argh.

So here I have this creepy horror story, about 1,000 words in length, which very, very obviously stars this creepy wasp nest statue thing as its featured creature... what the crud am I supposed to do with it?

Argh.

I supposed I'd be asking this same question if I'd managed to enter on time but didn't end up winning.

Usually when I write to a specific prompt--say, for an open anthology call or a themed magazine issue--I wait a few months after it's rejected to try to send it elsewhere. And I usually massage it a bit to disguise its origins and/or make it more accessible to the world outside of the original market's theme.

But this one, this one here, the contest said that the prompt had to be so integral to the story that it would simply fall apart without it. And so it is. And it's such a recognizable prompt, what with the photo going viral and all.

Arrrrrrgh.

Here's to better luck and more productive work tomorrow. On stories viable in more than one market.

Today I rediscovered Ku Cha as a place to get writing done. Ku Cha bills itself as a traditional Chinese tea house. While I have never set foot in a tea house in China and cannot therefore verify this claim, I'm reasonably convinced. They have oodles of teas in all the colors teas can be. Then they flavor some of them with stuff, and there are even more colors. And scents. And flavors.

Generally I go there for the greens, oolongs and pu-erhs. I go there to buy them by the ounce, or I go there to enjoy multiple steepings of them in Ku Cha's elegant, quiet, and entirely wi-fi-less tea room where I can write the afternoon away without interruption or distraction.

As y'all know, I've been a member of Fuse Coworking for some time now, and a full-time all-hours-access member since late October. I love the community, and I'm excited about what they are doing with the historic Riverside building. But I find I don't actually work there more than once or twice a week, so it's not really economical for me to carry a full-time membership--especially considering that, if all goes well, we'll be looking at paying double our current mortgage payment each month. Thus, as of May first I've demoted myself from full-time member to pay-as-you-go drop-in.

There are several reasons I haven't been working there more often. Some days I'm bouncing between writing work and household tasks all day, so I need to stay home. Some days I'm not able to get my work started on time, whether because certain drop-dead tasks claimed my attention or because I just slept late; on those days I don't want to delay things even further with transit, parking, and "settling in." If I go by car, parking is expensive. If I go by bike or bus, I'd better count on good weather--and extra time in transit. And then there's Wednesday and Thursday, when I have roller derby in the evenings and volunteer reading in the mornings. Sometimes going to the coworking office means less time actually working.

And then there's the painful reason I don't really know how to talk about with anyone, or even whether I should: I can't always get work done there at all.

It's sad! I feel like a traitor even admitting it. But coworking communities each have their own "flavor," their own styles of interactions, their own particular atmospheres... and the Fuse atmosphere is too often too noisy for me. Not always! Not every minute of the day. But any minute of the day could be a problem. Sure, there are specific times designated as "social hours," and I don't expect peace and quiet during those. I join in on the beer and chit-chat happily. But I'd have thought that, this being a co-working office, the default would be quiet time. Turns out, it just ain't so. There is no protected quiet time or quiet space. Rather, the atmosphere is one of jocular camaraderie, where everyone's encouraged to give voice to whatever's on their mind, at any time, in any corner of the Commons or the cafe, at any volume that feels natural. Or, at least, so it has seemed to me.

It is an exceedingly extroverted atmosphere. And I am a vehement introvert with the occasional capacity for out-and-out misanthropy. Basically, we're talking about a personality clash. Nobody's fault! No one's to blame! It's just an unfortunate thing that happens.

For some people, the way Fuse works is probably ideal for them. Most people I see there seem to enjoy it. They seem to thrive where there's always someone nearby to bounce an idea off of or just to strike up small chat with, and where their impulses aren't constrained by "quiet time" rules. But me, though--oh, how I fervently, desperately wish for more formal constraint! Something along the lines of "People are working hard all around you, so please take your phone calls and conversations outside where you won't disrupt them." But for the kind of co-worker for whom Fuse is absolutely perfect, that would no doubt be stifling.

I respect that. And that's why I haven't really said much about it--I recognize that Fuse's atmosphere has evolved out of deliberate choices in its community. And if at any moment I might be rendered absolutely incapable of writing, all my verbal circuits completely overwhelmed by a loud conversation less than ten feet away, it's not because anyone's doing anything wrong. It's just that my needs are a mismatch for the nature of the space.

So I'm now a drop-in member, paying by the day instead of by the month. That means I can reserve Fuse for those days when my workload isn't incompatible with an unpredictably raucous atmosphere, or for when they have special community events I wouldn't mind interrupting my work for. And that means I'll be a much happier person to be around when I am there, so I won't be a drag on the community. Hooray for not being a drag on the community!

Today was the kind of day when I knew I'd need quiet. But at the same time, I wanted to get out of the house. For the first time in several months, I had no disincentive against going somewhere other than Fuse to work.

The reasoning behind the disincentive goes like this: "Well, I could go to the tea house, I could go to a cafe. But then I'd be spending extra money there only to waste the money I already paid for a full membership at Fuse."

Today's reasoning went instead like this: "I need to work on three different short stories, one of which is in heavy revision mode. If I go to Fuse, and a spontaneous karaoke party breaks out in the Commons, I will not get anything done and that will make me unhappy. Instead, I could go to Ku Cha, where there's an aggressive 'no cell phones or loud conversations' policy in the tea room. Also a peaceful fountain, like I used to enjoy when Tea Spot was open. (Ah, Tea Spot.) Ooh! And I won't need to bring my own tea ware to keep myself in quality tea all day long. And I'm biking; carrying my tea ware around on my bike is awkward. That settles it! Ku Cha today, Fuse on Friday. And I'll make sure I have things to do Friday that can get done during spontaneous karaoke parties. Win-win!"

My reasoning is wordy like that.

The tea was Bi Luo Chun. Ku Cha was featuring it at the free tasting station. I had some and liked it well enough to want more. I spent about two hours there. I spent a little time freewriting on "Caroline's Wake" and on the prompt for Shock Totem's flash fiction contest. Then I threw myself against the mud wall that is the "Impact of Snowflakes" rewrite. Mud walls, unlike brick walls, do move, but it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to budge them even an inch. But that's all right; I was able to make that effort, sipping my tea and listening to the fountain.

And by the time the noisy pair of college dudes came in, laughing, bouncing on the cushions, and striking sudden poses, well, I was mostly done by then anyway.

Turns out, no place that has other people in it is perfect. Who'd have thought?

I'm just back this evening from taking my monthly turn as part of a dynamic training duo on the roller derby track. Have I mentioned that leading Phase 1 really wears me out? In a good way, that is. I can't not do the exercises along with the class; that feels like standing around while other people are working. So I get to practice the basics while I mentally dissect them in order to better explain and demonstrate them.

Additionally, tonight's Phase 1 class was Day 1 for the latest group of new recruits. A huge, fantastic, wildly enthusiastic group of new recruits (two of whom I happen to have been in writing groups with before! Small world). So I am not only physically worn out, but also emotionally worn out (again, in a good way--so many new recruits! So happy! So much energy... that the crash will be spectacular). Mentally, too, because we had to take care of a bunch of intake procedures and administrative tasks that started when the first skater arrived and continued well after we'd all left the track. It was like coming home from one of the more successful New Recruit Nights last year while I still headed up the Recruiting Committee. Very exciting! But also very exhausting.

So it was a good thing that today's farm work wasn't particularly exhausting. It's that happy time of year when the seedings have sprouted. It's like magic! Healthy and joyful green sprouts shooting up in rows of abundance from those trays of dirt we prepped and planted several weeks ago. I wish I'd remembered to take photos! Photos were taken, though--I think they may show up on this Facebook page soon.

Now, the thing to do when the seedlings are at this stage in their development--about an inch or two tall, just getting their first true leaves--is to thin them down to a single plant per tray cell. So that's what we did all day. We stood around a table set up next to the greenhouse, wielded very sharp needle-nosed clippers, and snipped away all but the single most vibrant sprouts in each cell. The plants I helped with today were chard (rainbow, rhubarb, and yellow) and peppers (I forget the varieties; possibly criollo was one of them).

Overthinking the process is always a danger. But it's a logical temptation. After all, you're deciding which plant lives and which plants die! You have to get this right. Perfectly logical, except for one thing: with few exceptions, almost any healthy plant is the "right" plant.

Which isn't to say that there's no decision-making process. You want to select for the plant with the thickest, straightest, healthiest stem. That's your ideal. In the case of a tie-breaker, you select for the plant with the lushest, biggest leaves. If that's a stumper, too, you select for the plant closest to the center of the cell.

But as long as there's one healthy plant per cell when you're done (at least, one healthy plant per cell that wasn't empty in the first place), you haven't done wrong. So the pressure's off.

So instead of overthinking it, you get into a rhythm. You glance at the miniature forest under consideration, you decide without too much angst which little tree you want to keep, and you snip the rest. Or if there are too many to choose between at first (some of the chard had eight to ten plants per cell!), then you snip one or two that obviously don't make the cut. Then you consider the plants that remain.

After a while you're making your decisions very quickly. Your eye has adjusted to this mental yardstick. And your confidence has increased such that you know you're not going to accidentally cut them all, or cut the only healthy plant so that you're left with a stunted and badly rooted yellowing thing. You know that you're going to make an acceptable decision. So you stop worrying and you just get on with it.

This was one of the most helpful things I took away from my trip partway through John Vorhaus's Creativity Rules: A Writer's Workbook. He identified for me a prevalent cause of writer's block: Fear of unlimited choice. That's what makes the blank page so intimidating. You can put anything on it. The possibilities are endless! How can you possibly choose the right one?

Well, when it comes right down to it, any choice is the right one. That's because your choice isn't between a single right idea and an infinity of wrong ones. It's between leaving the page blank or filling it with words. The right choice is always to fill the blank page with words. So don't stress, don't overthink it--just start writing.

Besides, paper is virtually unlimited, digital paper doubly so. All those ideas you didn't choose this time, they'll be there for you to play with another time.

(The other thing I took from the Vorhaus is the idea that any words are the right words, because any time you write, you're practicing your craft. Practice today makes you a better writer tomorrow. Every tomorrow's goal is to be a better writer than the writer you are today. Thus the right choice is to write.)

So there's your farm-to-writing metaphor of the day: Don't overthink things and angst over decisions in your craft. Trust yourself. The writing trusts you, so you should too.

Hey, check it out! The entryway is done! So... maybe from this photo it's hard to tell how nice that gold crown molding looks, but trust me, it's glorious. Better yet, it's no longer that "rotten peaches and curdled cream" theme that the unit had when we moved in. See the second photo for comparison, showing where the dining area (done) meets the living room closet wall (not done).

Again, realize we bought the place in August of the year 2000. It feels so good to be finally picking up this project again. It feels really nice to walk into the house and see those newly painted walls that at last look the way we've wanted them to look all these years.

Except--argh!--the entryway isn't quite done yet. You can't see it from here, but the doorjamb is still cream, splashed with white from the new paint job. We'll paint that on Tuesday. Then we'll decide when to tackle the next piece of house waiting for its makeover. And what that next piece of house should be. Probably that central "hallway" where the doors to the bathroom and the two bedrooms let out just off the living room.

Meanwhile, in writing news... More argh. I'll just say that, when the next scene of a short story looks impossible to write, suddenly Examiner articles look really attractive. One of these things I know I can do. And its completion state is easy to define.

"Look," I tell myself, "you don't have to get the scene right in one go. All you have to do is set a timer for 25 minutes and babble to yourself about what needs to be in that scene. Freewriting mode, right? Freewriting is fun!"

To which myself tends to reply, "Sure. Yep. Totally. Except--right after this quick blog article about some writing events this weekend, OK? Sooner I publish that, more useful it is, right? Because it's timely, see?"

It's so very easy to convince myself that I have good reasons for avoiding the thing I want to avoid.

Argh.

Tomorrow's another day, and next week is another week. That's always comforting to remember, even if--once again--there's only two more "another weeks" to go before the deadline I'm trying to hit is here and gone.

Well, there's a depressing title. Only it's not meant to be. It's more about the forgiveness than about the giving up, after all. And the giving up is only temporary. It goes something like this:

"If I haven't gotten it done by 11:00 PM, I shouldn't beat myself up trying to get it done by 1:00 AM."

See? Forgiveness. Giving up on getting a thing done today isn't really giving up. It's just deferring. And deferring is better than hurting myself with stress and unrealistic expectations.

"Hurting myself" isn't entirely metaphorical, or solely emotional. I've been stressing myself into mouth ulcers again lately. Mouth ulcers make eating difficult, and eating is one of my favorite things, so that nonsense has really gotta stop.

This new epiphany goes triple on Wednesday and Thursday nights. If it's unlikely I'll get productive work done after 11:00 PM normally, it's extra special unlikely after roller derby practice or scrimmage. And I'm feeling particularly beat up after tonight's scrimmage. At some point during the night I took a skate wheel to my right calf. It might actually have been my own skate wheel. Now that sucker's so bruised and tender that the simple act of walking is a challenge. And I took one of those hard side-hits that makes you feel like your ribs are about to fold in on each other like the wings of a butterfly or maybe the legs of a card table. Ow ow ow ow.

(I was jamming. One of the opposing blockers, hearing me whimper and not stop whimpering, said, "Just fall down, Fleur, it's OK, we'll take a knee and call the jam off," and I was all "Nope! (ow) Two minutes (ow) have got to end (ow) sometime..." Then the jam ended and I drifted off to the team bench, still whimpering. Have I mentioned I'm not a jammer? I'm so not a jammer. I jam like the unsophisticated blocker that I am: brute force all the way, and no agility to fall back on when that doesn't work. *sigh*)

So basically I'm good for nothing right now except downing a couple ibuprofen and also the entire order of chicken egg fu yong from Golden Sun. Wheeeeee food coma. And maybe reading the rest of Seanan McGuire's online "Velveteen" stories. (I'm midway through "vs. The Eternal Halloween" at the moment.)

And apparently writing a blog post in which I whine about stuff. Hi.

So I'm just giving myself permission to go easy on myself now, and leave anything yet undone for tomorrow. And I'm thinking about how they came to remain undone, and learning from that, and identifying mistakes in time- and energy-management I shouldn't make tomorrow. So that's a good thing too.

By the way, the house painting continues. The entryway now finally looks like the living room, in that it not only has white walls rather than cream, but gold crown molding rather than pink. I laid down the first coat of gold this afternoon, and John put the second coat on while I was at derby. It looks awesome. Now all it needs is the finishing touch, the sponged-on application of a red-gold glaze. We'll do that tomorrow when we have daylight again. It's a process that requires natural light, and plenty of it, to decide how much sponging-on is enough.

Then we get to decide when we're going to attack the next piece of our house that still needs painting.

Here's a hint: it won't be tomorrow.

Well, I got the first scene written today. That was the easy part. Look, I have attempted this story so many times, the first scene is now pretty much a final draft based on about four different preliminary drafts. Tomorrow's task is to get the second scene down, and *that* one has more moving parts and less drafts to work from. Argh.

In other news, we painted another wall today. Now, for the first time in about ten years, the entryway matches most of the rest of the house. Or it will once we paint the crown molding gold. That, also, is tomorrow's task.

Tomorrow's tasks will be upon us sooner than one might think, because I'm about to collapse for the night. Because roller derby. Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.