author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A thing I learned today: It's amazing how much one can do if one actually gets out of bed up on time.

However, it's also amazing how easily a small roadblock can dam that fresh flow of productivity. To wit:

A thing I really wish I'd learned today: Why the heck Scrivener will only successfully launch once on the ASUS.

That's it. Just once after install. After I exit the program, the next time I attempt to use it, it will completely fail to launch ever again. Sometimes it signals its failure by a big blank window that includes the parenthetical "(Not Responding)" in its title bar. Sometimes it just sits there, invisibly, in the Task Manager list of processes. In neither case will it enable me to write. Recovering functionality then requires uninstalling Scrivener, rebooting the computer, and reinstalling Scrivener. Some service or background application is clearly jamming up the works, and it's not Dropbox, because I got rid of that sucker. It may be time to disable pretty much every service listed in msconfig and see what happens.

A thing I already knew: What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

It is still too early to determine which of those two categories, "things that kill me" or "things that make me stronger" All Stars practice will ultimately fall into. But if you illustrated that venerable saying by means of a Venn diagram, with "things that kill me" in one circle and "things that make me stronger" in another, non-overlapping circle, you would then draw a larger circle such that it encompassed both of the smaller two, and that larger circle would be labeled, "things that are, in fact, trying to kill me."

I dunno; maybe I'm being a little overdramatic. I plead not guilty by reason of being under the influence of my body, which is top pro at complaining, y'all.

Complain or not, it's going to skate again tomorrow evening at Bombshells practice.

(This may or may not occasion more Venn diagrams.)

The weekend was as full of derby as advertised. Fuller, even. More full than I actually expected; turns out that I was permitted to participate in C Team practice. So I did. The only thing I wasn't allowed to do, as a skater without an up to date skills assessment, was scrimmage. Except I ended up scrimmaging a little after all so that the coaches could score my jammer, blocker, and pack awareness skills as part of my assessment. (John typically writes our numbers on our shoulders with a Sharpie marker before scrimmage. "Five Zero Four. It's been a while since I last wrote this number," he said. "I know," I said, "I've missed it.") Then, after scrimmage, they put me through the rest of my paces and completed my assessment. I didn't expect that, either; I thought we'd get some of that done, but that some of it would have to wait for Thursday.

I also didn't expect to utterly collapse during the post-derby periods of each day, which includes today as well. It's amazing how eight weeks off-skates can return a body to a state of Utterly Unprepared to Exercise.

So no, Friday's Fictionette remains not done yet. I might manage to finish it tonight. I might not. I am having trouble with Scrivener, which seems to be having trouble with Dropbox, which is itself having trouble believing me when I tell it I don't want it to run at startup, nor do I in fact want it installed. In any case, I thought I'd write this blog post now rather than leaving it for my usual midnight scramble.

In addition to roller derby, there was bowling. We had a small team-building party after practice Sunday at the bowling lanes in Longmont. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we do it again sometime. But it was fun that involved Unaccustomed Exertions, namely, hefting a 12lb bowling ball for two hours and nearly three whole games. My upper back and right shoulder were tight and sore by the time we were done, and they just got tighter and more sore over the course of the evening. This probably has something to do with the headache that kept me uselessly horizontal most of today.

I'm hoping that as I get back into condition, physical activity will cease to exact quite so high a price. It has to if I'm going to function at all, because there's going to be a lot of physical activity in my near future.

I understand that the "Respectable career woman by day, hard-hitting roller derby skater by night" format of skater bio causes a certain amount of exasperated eye-rolling among participants and fans, and for the same reason fans of the sequential art storytelling format roll their eyes at yet another headline of the "Wham! Bam! Pow! Comic books aren't just for kids anymore!" format. And yet, that skater bio is so accurate. Full-time writer by day, roller derby skater by night. Pretty much every night, these days. And also all day Sunday. And some Saturdays, according to the current season's bout and tournament schedule.

Because the result of this weekend's skills assessment is, I'm a "BombStar." I've not only been put back on our B Team, my beloved Bombshells for whom I've skated since the team's formation in 2012, but I was also offered the chance I've feared and hoped for all this time, to additionally join our A Team, the All Stars. The practice schedule of a crossover (two-team) skater is a crowded and exhausting one. I'm having a hard enough time fitting all the things I want to do into the same life with only one team to skate for. But this is the next step in my roller derby career, and I'm going to take it. It's not just the chance to compete as part of our league's WFTDA charter. That's exciting, yes--and also terrifying! But more important to me is the chance to practice at the WFTDA charter level. More will be expected of me, and I'll become a stronger and better skater because of it.

That's the season-long view of things. Meanwhile, my immediate goal is to not have this development change my cheesy bio to "Hibernating bear by day..." I suppose, given a few weeks of practice, I'll adjust. But today, Monday the 23rd, I'll just have to accept as more or less a complete write-off.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 24th, isn't looking very good for writing, either. Besides having Tuesday All Star practice, I also have my final physical therapy appointment and I'm meeting the CPA about our taxes. Which means I have to get all our documentation in order between now and then. Argh.

And then Wednesday is volunteer reading and Bombshells practice. And Thursday is scrimmage. And we're moving in April.

Somehow, I'm going to make this all of this work out. It oughtn't to be that hard. Compared to some of our league skaters--some of whom are parents, some of whom are students, most of whom have full-time jobs outside the home--I've got it easy. I should be able to do this! All I have to do is figure out how.

Well. Good luck to me!

Alas, but the Friday Fictionette for March 20, 2015 will be be late. I don't have a particularly good excuse for it. It's giving me trouble, and I'm giving me trouble, and so it'll go up over the weekend. Also I think the cover notes post for last week's fictionette still has to go up. Argh. I hate getting behind on things. It tends to snowball.

And there's still this short story I'm supposed to be revising. To editorial request. Why is this not done yet whyyyyyyyyy.

While I'm making excuses and admitting temporary defeat, I ought to give y'all a heads-up that things are going to get a little crowded with me, schedule-wise. Our closing date for selling this house is coming up on April 1st (no joke, ha ha). Presumably our closing date for buying the new place will be shortly thereafter. Then we're moving between April 7 and April 12. And then John and I will be taking a little road trip to Bloomington, Indiana, for a roller derby tournament on the 18th and 19th. Whether I will actually skate in said tournament will be determined by whether I succeed at assessing and getting placed back on our B team. (Despite the kind words and encouraging expectations of my league mates, I am not taking this for granted; the universe likes to smack you if you get smug.) But at the very least, we've committed to going. So that's three nights reserved at the hotel bracketed by two days of driving each way.

These are all very exciting developments, but they are also somewhat pressurizing. I suspect by the end of April my mouth will have blossomed in ulcers, which is my body's typical reaction to periods of sustained stress. I suspect I will look back on March 2015 as "the halcyon days."

Anyway. I'll do a bonus weekend blog post when the fictionette goes up, so's you'll know.

Meanwhile, I'm going to skate my legs off. I'll attend Phase 2 practice at noon tomorrow, and before that I'll join some of the Derby Lite folks for trail skating in Boulder. Then on Sunday I'll attend Bombshells practice. Which is to say, I'll gear up, hopefully knock a few items off my assessment checklist, and participate in as much of team practice as I'm allowed to given that I'm not technically on the team yet this year.

And next week I will be a busy little bee. A busy little, productive little bee. A busy little pen-wielding, fast-typing bee making large amounts of literary honey.

OK, that metaphor got weird. Let's just say I'll be busy, right?

So I was a penalty timer at the Shamrocks And Shenanigans scrimmage tonight. When you're a penalty timer, everyone comes to visit you. Everyone gets penalties, after all. Maybe not everyone on every night, but everyone eventually. If you never ever get penalties, it's questionable whether you're in the game.

When I arrived, I told our head coach, "I'm ready to be assessed! Whenever works for you." (I got injured before the league went through skills assessments and travel team tryouts. I still need to do that before I can skate with any of our teams.)

She said, "Great! Get your gear on."

And I said, "Er, tonight? I... didn't think that would be an option." I hadn't brought my gear. Drat.

By next week, though. Between Sunday practice and the following Thursday scrimmage, I should have ample opportunity to demonstrate my skills to people empowered to fill out my score sheet. After that... team practice again? Please? As soon as possible? Back with my Bombshells? Pretty-please?

Obviously this has been much on my mind.

It has been sharing space in there with something very random: the Mark Reads archives for the Discworld novels.

You know about Mark Reads? Blogger Mark Oshiro began a project some years ago to read the Twilight novels and comment on them, chapter by chapter. And, well, a lot of people came along for the ride. It wasn't so much that they enjoyed watching him suffer, per se--it was that he suffered so entertaingly. And also enlighteningly, if that's a word. His criticisms were spot-on and his pain was shared and familiar.

Inevitably, the blog community began urging him to read something he'd actually enjoy. As soon as he got through Breaking Dawn, they said, he should treat himself. Read Harry Potter, they said. Because, as it turned out, he hadn't read those books yet. There were a lot of books, beloved classics of the fantasy genre, that he'd just never been exposed to. And his fans not only wanted him to enjoy a reading experience, but they wanted to enjoy watching him experience it.

And Mark read it. And it was wonderful.

You can never go back and read a favorite book for the first time all over again. Not so long as your memory is intact, that is. But the privilege of watching someone else read that book for the first time, witnessing them falling in love with the characters you've come to know so well, that's almost as wonderful. Maybe it's even better.

Mark has since then read many, many wonderful books, and his fans have enjoyed the heck out of watching him discover all these worlds and characters. And for a commission of $20, I think it is, he'll add to his written review video footage of him reading the chapter aloud. And that's the best. His reactions are priceless, hilarious and touching by turns.

So about a year ago he embarked upon a chapter-by-chapter read-through and review of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. In--and this is important--the order that they were published. (Which means he's only now making his way through Eric.) Discworld fandom is large and it is contentious; veterans will often try to curate newbies' experiences by telling them which books to read first. "Oh, don't start with Colour Of Magic, he hadn't gotten good yet, you'll be turned off. Read Reaper Man first," or, "Rincewind is tiresome. Read the Vimes books instead," or whatever they'll recommend.

Which is understandable, but at the same time, it's kind of arrogant. Like, dude, you're so proud of having been around when Colour of Magic came out, you read them in publication order because you had no choice--you still fell head over heels in love with them. Why do you think someone approaching them for the first time today couldn't do the same? Why do you think they need you to shepherd them through the experience? And why is it so important to you that they come to the same conclusion about the characters that you did?

Sometimes it's understandable, like I said; you love a thing, you want them to love it too. You want to spare them the jarring moments of the not-quite-good-enough. But sometimes I think, there are some fans who have a bit of ego involved in being the living filter through which someone experiences the material. I suspect that, either consciously or un--, it makes them feel important.

To hell with that. Mark is going into this as completely unspoiled and unbiased as a reader on publication day would, only without the three-year wait between The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. His spoiler policy is aggressive, and I share it: If I haven't gotten there yet, don't talk about it. Allow me to experience it the way you did--without you hanging over my shoulder saying, "Oh, this is when it gets good" and "Just wait until you meet [CHARACTER] in Chapter [X]!"

I only heard that this was a thing the week after Terry Pratchett died. And it's been fantastic. I've been watching his videos or, where appropriate, converting them to MP3 and listening to them in the car. Not only does it convert these old familiar books into brand new experiences for me, but it comes at a time when 1. I wanted to commemorate the author's passing with a read-through of my own, but 2. all my books are in storage and I can't easily get to them. So I get to have Mark read them to me! And I get to hear him react to the awesomeness! And the hilarity! And the puns, dear Gods, the puns. (Oh Gods the "horse d'oeurves" pun. Mark's reaction to the pun. It takes him like three minutes to get past it, it hits him that hard. I love Mark this much, y'all.)

I've just gotten up to Mark's read-through of Mort. And it occurs to me I may never actually have read Mort before. I could swear I'd borrowed it from a friend back in the late '90s, but I'm not recognizing any of it at all. Maybe my memory isn't intact--which would be odd, for me--but maybe The Last Continent isn't the last Discworld book I've yet to read? This is such a treat.

Like I told John, "Mark's reading Discworld! Expect my productivity to dip a bit." And so it has. Drat.

Updates!

On skating: Phase 2 happened. I hit people. They hit me back. I fell down once, but at no time did I reinjure my knee. I sure tired it out some good, though. It was starting to make grumpy noises at me by the time we did our five-minute sprint. But I still got 27 laps in 4:52, so I'm happy.

On content writing: My article about our upcoming St. Patrick's Day scrimmage got approved yesterday (huge thanks to Boom for giving me permission to use her photos; hers are the ones that actually look good), so I have indeed successfully posted my first content to AXS.com. However, AXS doesn't appear to believe in RSS feeds, at least not so far as I can tell. So until I have enough time and the necessary attention span to figure out how to write some sort of benevolent screen-scraper, I'm creating a feed by hand so that my AXS articles will show up in my Grand Unified Blog Post Feed.

On other sorts of writing: Life is just one damn thing after another, isn't it? Today's writing time got primarily eaten up by Audacity, the free audio editor. It's Wednesday, right? So I have to read an hour's worth of employment ads from around the Rocky Mountain region and upload the resulting recording to the Audio Information Network of Colorado by 2:48 PM at the very latest, right?

Except here's the thing: I just switched laptops.

John's series of programming jobs over the last ten years have not only supported my writing habit monetarily; they have also been beneficial from a hardware point of view. Which is to say, several of the jobs he's held have provided him with work laptops, and most of those employers did not ask for said laptops back when they parted ways. So there's been a sort of graveyard of neglected laptops on and off throughout the years, stacked under my desk, stowed in the closet. When my 15" Dell Inspiron outgrew its three-year warranty and began to sort of implode, I hopped off that sinking ship onto John's 14" Dell Inspiron, which he'd bought at the same time but used very little, having soon after that been assigned an Asus U56E by his job at the time.

To my eternal envy, that Asus acted like the gaming laptop that I'd spent extra money trying to ensure my Dell would be, but, as it turns out, wasn't. Since when were work laptops any good at gaming? And yet when we sat down to play Spiral Knights, he was always waiting in the elevator lobby, ready to play almost a full minute before my machine finished loading the next clockworks level. And, as it turns out, it handles Second Life with amazing smoothness.

Anyway, I got a good two, two and a half years out of his abandoned Dell Inspiron. And then it started to fall apart over the last few months. It began throwing more keys than that typewriter in Stephen King's Misery. (Dvorakly speaking, first the "o" started coming loose, then the "e", which are "s" and "d" in Qwerty, respectively. Then the right arrow, of all things.) The rubber strip contacting the tabletop began to stretch so that this loop of it hung out and caught on things; I eventually just ripped the dang thing off. The battery began to reach the end of its life. Its power cords broke, one after the other, and the replacement off eBay turned out to really mess with the functionality of the Alps touchpad--which was never that brilliant to begin with. (Seriously, Alps drivers need to learn a thing or two about effective touch-check. I'd have its sensitivity set so low, and its touch-check set so high, that I could barely use it at all--and yet it would still accidentally click on the position of the mouse cursor because the edge of my right palm pierced its airspace.)

Much of those things are fixable. A new keyboard, a new battery, a power cord from a different manufacturer--but would these be worth acquiring given that the thing was starting to run super hot, and that it sometimes crashed when I unplugged the external monitor, and it never could play a video all the way through without buffering, and it didn't have an HDMI jack--

And it gave me a Blue Screen of Death yesterday. First time I'd seen that since the 15" Dell Inspiron began to die.

So I grabbed the Asus from its spot near the TV--it had sort of turned into a dedicated but infrequently used HDMI media source--and began moving in.

(This, by the way, is my not-very-good-excuse for not getting to that AXS article until quite late at night. I was moving files from the 14" Dell to the Asus. Watching files cross the network can be mesmerizing.)

And then today it was time to do my reading. Now, generally I've used a copy of Studio Recorder with a non-profit license provided by AINC to its volunteers. But I really, really didn't want to go dig out the install CD from whatever box I'd stowed it away in at the back of the top of the closet. And Audacity is free, right? Any number of LibreVox readers use it! Why shouldn't I?

And Audacity is free. And it is powerful. Audacity is to Studio Recorder as GIMP is to Microsoft Paint. And the learning curve is just as steep.

Which means that by the time I finally got my recording finished and uploaded, I was sort of staring at spots on the wall and faintly laughing at them. ALL MY BRAIN. USED UP. CANNOT NO MORE.

Got by brain back just in time for derby! And then, you know, derby. I'm about to drop, y'all.

So now I have a date with my foam roller, and then I am due to plop into bed, where I will sleep very easily tonight.

Tomorrow, there shall be better writerly things to report. And also a roller derby scrimmage. You may have heard. Some skater from Boulder seems to have babbled about it on AXS.com. So.

Ahoy! It’s a brand new week, and I have done a brand new thing. I just put up an article on AXS.com. Probably. I mean, I completed and submitted it. So it’ll show up sometime tomorrow, I think, pending editor approval.

Back in October, Examiner sent out an email inviting its bloggers to apply to be AXS.com contributors. So I thought, sure, OK, why not? They’re all about local sports and entertainment, and I like to go to shows. Maybe I might want to write about them. Maybe do an article about best sports bars to watch NFL games in? I dunno.

And then I wrote nothing at all for them for months and months.

So this month I caught myself thinking, like I often do, “My league is doing another public event! I should publicize. Too bad it doesn’t really fit under either of my Examiner channels. Should I apply to create a Boulder Roller Derby channel…?” I have had that thought quite a bit since joining the Boulder County Bombers.

And then I smacked myself in the face. “Wake up, silly! You do have a roller derby channel.”

So that’s how my first AXS.com article came to be written and submitted. (Over the course of three effin’ hours. Why. Whyyyyyy. Five hundred words should not take three effin’ hours. Why.) It’s not up yet, so I can’t link you, but, better still, I can link you to the event:

Shamrocks & Shenanigans 2015: Another public holiday-themed mix-up scrimmage hosted by the Boulder County Bombers! Thursday, March 19, 7:30 PM, at the Ed & Ruth Lehman YMCA in Longmont (950 Lashley Street, zip code 80304). Wear green for St. Patrick’s Day and prepare to LIVE GOLD BLEED GOLD! …*ahem* Free admission, but bring cash for several fundraiser raffle/bake sale/drink stand type goodies.

I will be there in some non-skating capacity--not because I can't skate at all, but because I have not yet been reassessed. I went to Phase 1 practice on Saturday and last night, and aside from the expected morning-after experience of I am sore, dear Gods I'm sore, all my bits are sooooore, there have been no adverse effects. And I got 26 laps in I think 4:58 last night, with much hacking and coughing afterwards. I should easily be able to cram 27 laps into 5 minutes simply by skating on a less crowded track. (Our current Phase 1 class has like 20 new skaters. It's amazing! And wonderful!) I won't turn down any chances to practice between now and assessments, though. After eight weeks off skates, I'm in dire need of getting my wind back. The less hacking and coughing I can manage to do, the better.

Tomorrow night I'll go to Phase 2 and see how I handle contact practice. After that... well, I don't know for sure. I'll work with my coaches to schedule a time to make up the assessments that I missed thanks to my injury and to try out for the 2015 travel team roster. When that happens will depend on a lot of moving parts of which I am merely one, so I'm not going to make any positive statements about when I'll be back in the game for reals. I'm just going to get as much practice in as I possibly (and reasonably) can.

Which is, come to think of it, a pretty good aspiration in the context of writing, too. ROLLER DERBY IS TOTALLY A METAPHOR FOR WRITING. True story.

Which is not to say it's perfect. Fictionettes are never perfect; that's the point. They're a slice of process made presentable. (Again, I really know how to sell these things, don't I?) But the rightness of the shape of the world is relevant to this fictionette. I like to give the Friday blog posts a title that's relevant to the fictionette I'm posting. Even if it makes no sense to anyone but me. When do blog post titles make sense to anyone but me, right?

But anyway! The Friday Fictionette is here, while yet it's still Friday. It is called "No One's Home." You can read the excerpt in the usual places (here at the actually writing blog, there at Patreon, and I'll get it up on Wattpad over the weekend). Anyway, it's kind of this sad little creepy thing that ends in a kind of cautious hope. It's got bittersweet layers to it--in my mind, at least. Both the cat and the human are scarred by their pasts. All they've got is each other. And then this happens, whatever this is.

I'll want to come back to it, find out more about the two characters. The human calls the cat Micah, for instance, which is short for what she actually named it, which is Formica. Like the countertop laminate. Which is one of those odd and loveable details I want to know more about.

Boilerplate about Friday Fictionettes: I post a new story-like object every first through fourth Friday to my Patreon page for exclusive download (PDF) by Patrons pledging at least a dollar a month. Think of it as a short-short story subscription service with free access to all the back-issues while you subscribe. If you're not a Patron yet, you still get access to the one I release as a freebie at the end of each month, plus, again, access to all past Fictionette Freebies. I've been doing this since September 2014, so there's a good chunk of reading material in the archives by now.

Boilerplate ends. Thank you for reading.

Now! Now I must go to bed and sleeeeeeep. Because tomorrow I wake up bright and early and go to my first roller derby practice since getting injured on January 10th. Roller derby practice! With the skates on my feet and everything! So excited!

Hark! A blog post! What's it about? Er... probably not writing, I'm afraid.

Well, for one thing, you don't want to hear me complain about how despite Conlorado's being over I can't seem to string two hours together for any one thing. Other things keep intervening. I'm hoping next week will look better than this one, honestly.

For another thing, the really exciting thing happening this week isn't to do with writing. My life is large, it contains multitudes of things one might do with a life, and as it turns out the really exciting thing was putting my skates back on for the first time in eight weeks.

Yeah. Got cleared to skate at my physical therapy appointment today.

As always, the therapist asked how I was feeling and how my knee was feeling. "Extremely well!" I burbled. The quad pain that scared me so much last week was gone the next day, and the cripplingly stiff calf muscles loosened up until I could do full-stride lunges without pain again. I attribute this to the foam rolling iterations. They hurt but they work. They're like... well. Have you read Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy? Magic in those books can work utter miracles, but working it requires the mage to suffer self-inflicted pain. That's the cost of magic in that world. Foam rolling is like a limited-scope miracle of that sort of magic.

So he had me do the usual warm-ups, and then the usual balancing acts, and then a lot of jumping. This is a situation where "He said 'jump,' I said 'how high?'" is the literal truth. How high? How long? How many times? I jumped on two legs and I hopped on one. I hopped in place, and forward, and in a zig-zagging sideways progression. I jumped from side to side, which felt like I was back at derby doing my Inside/Outside drills. Finally, I chugged a glass of water and he said, "I'm comfortable with you skating." And I, of course, said "Yippee!"

So I accompanied John to scrimmage tonight. That had been my plan already; I wanted to make myself available as an extra non-skating official, like last week. But I augmented the plan by bringing my skates and skating laps during warm-ups and half-time.

It felt great.

Oh, sure, my left leg was noticeably quicker to tire than my right. But all my moves were there, and they didn't hurt. I skated forward and backward, clockwise and widdershins, crossovers and sculling. I performed tomahawk stops and hockey stops. I got up and down on my kneepads helping one of the refs re-tape parts of the track. And I got to know the slightly wobbly character of the barn floor. Skating! I still know how to do it!

So I'll be attending a couple of Phase 1 practices to make sure I'm good to go, then I'll do Phase 2 until the coaches have time to assess me for minimum skills and team placement. And then everything will be back to normal. Derby will go back to eating my life right up, bones and all. And soon we'll move house, and I won't have to carry my skate bag up 24 steps after practice.

Now I'll post this, and I'll go do my magic foam roller ritual, and I'll probably say some very unprintable things while I do. My left IT band is already grumbling at me after all the unexpected work, so I expect tonight's foam roller session will be particularly eventful.

Please welcome the latest Friday Fictionette to the family, "Please To Confirm Your Appointment With BRIGHT SMILES!," an excerpt of which you may read here. It was a lot of fun to write. I should warn you, though, it ends on a cliff-hanger. I have several ideas for what happens next, any of which could supply the material for a full-length short story. Deciding between them, now, that's the trick.

Conlorado weekend continues; the whole gang's in town now and they're over at a friend's house playing games. I'm at home because after trips to the airport and the liquor store I was kind of tired, and I'm also rather enjoying the empty house. For a little while, the whole gang was over here in our tiny living room/dining room area, and I was hiding in the bedroom with a book. I like to hear a house full of happy people, but I get overwhelmed by the bustle and crowd very easily. Most of the afternoon they were playing a game of Paperback, which looks like a lot of fun--it even has a writer theme to it!--but I couldn't see my way to squeezing into the group who were already sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around the table. So I just listened in and enjoyed things vicariously.

Yes, in fact, I proudly and cheerfully accept the label "introvert." I suggest printing it in bold-face capitals, possibly ones constructed from bright flashing neon tubes. But not where I can see them, because argh, blinking lights.

We had some delightful surprises at the liquor store. Hazel's is a great place for delightful surprises, because they have everything. They had Abita's Grapefruit Harvest IPA, which I didn't know ever made it out of Louisiana. It's one of the few IPAs I will willingly drink. They also had in their soft drink section four different handmade flavors from the Rocky Mountain Soda Company. We brought home the "Evergreen Elderberry" and the "Breckenridge Blackberry."

"We brought you local sodas!" John crowed to our friend who'd asked for interesting caffeine-free soft drinks. "It's the Boulder Way!"

And now I had better hurry up and do my PT before I go to bed--

About that. Alas, the therapist did not clear me to skate yesterday. I came in complaining of cripplingly tight calf-muscles and stabbing pains in the quads of the affected leg. ("I have this terrible pain in the diodes down my left side...") He determined these were normal reactions from the muscles surrounding an injured ligament as regular work is once more required from them and they're grumpy about it. So I have another week of strengthening things up, plus daily foam roller sessions on quads, calves, and IT bands to work the kinks out.

Thus, Foam Roller Hell, here I come!

This will be a very quick post, because today has been a very long day. It was a day involving both physical therapy and roller derby (albeit in a non-skating capacity for me; I was a penalty timer), which means by the time I got home for the night I was ready to collapse. Additionally, there were elements of The House-Buying Saga (though they were admittedly quickly dispatched) and highly energetic social times involving people arriving from out of town for the annual gathering we call Conlorado.

(Short story: One year, John came home from Gen Con disappointed that he and his friends just didn't get to play enough games together. So he invited everyone to come visit and play games in the context of a private weekend-long con of their own. Thus Conlorado was born. This is its third iteration.)

It's the sort of day where everything will get done, but some will get done very briefly and on the way to sleep.

So this will be a very quick post wherein I recommend another post: Kameron Hurley's post on Tor.com, "I Love Writing Books, So I Need To Get Better At Writing Them."

Despite having been written three months earlier, it's crossed my radar at a time when my various online circles of writerly friends and acquaintances are talking about what might be charitably described as an ego-piece by an ex-teacher who, if this is how he felt about teaching, would have been happier and would have done less damage had he quit teaching sooner. I've had it recommended to me by readers who admired it for its much-needed candor, which strikes me as a noun related to the adjectival phrase "proudly politically incorrect." I've also seen it skewered by the likes of the inimitable Chuck Wendig and the very wise Foz Meadows, who quite rightly have no time or patience for his bullshit.

Basically, the ex-teacher has a few smart things to say about how talking about writing isn't writing, and how you need to actually write to make it as a writer, and how that involves hard work and the willingness to take criticism and forge that into better writting.

And then he wraps those unarguable truths in a lot of poison for which there is no excuse.

And then his admirers say that you have to excuse him the poison, because he's just jaded and tired and has had to deal with obnoxious self-entitled grad students, and besides, you're ignoring his real point.

(And I think, wouldn't it be nice if female writers who wrapped some hard, inarguable truths in a coating of righteous wrath were supported for the sake of their good points, their abrasiveness understood in the context of how much crap they'd had to put up with? Instead of being condemned and dismissed for their anger, their harsh "tone," their profanity, if only they'd be more polite maybe they'd succeed at winning allies--)

(But I digress.)

I say, we are blessed in this world with so many great writers that the very finite nature of our time upon this earth obliges us to pick and choose among them. Everyone has their own criteria for this choice. Me, I tend to choose those who can express hard, inarguable truths without wrapping them in dog turds and arsenic.

Here, therefore, is Hurley writing about the ways in which a writer at any level, at any age works hard to improve her craft. Her article has in common with the other article the hard, inarguable truths that you must work hard, you must continue to work hard, your work will never be done. But it makes no toxic pretense of prophesying. There are no attempts in Hurley's piece to distinguish between the writers with talent versus the writers who'll never make it, nor to tell the later to give up and stop trying.

Much the opposite.

The ex-MFA dude says, if you don't have talent you'll never make it. If you didn't take the art seriously before you were legal to drink, you'll never make it. If you are currently having a hard time making time to write, if you spend more time talking about writing than you do actually writing, if you're not in fact good at writing yet, if you--

Hurley says, "So what? You're not dead yet."

If you're still alive, you've still got time: to break bad habits, to figure out your schedule, to shift your priorities, to improve your fluency, to deepen your craft, to stop talking and start writing, to make it as a writer, to decide for yourself what "making it" means, to decide that "making it" is a mirage and a chimera and that you are content to keep working at this writing thing "until the last breath leaves your body."

So no one--no writer, no teacher, no Nobel laureate--has any business telling you "you'll never make it as a writer." And why the crap should they want to? Seems a little busy-body of them. Seems like something that doesn't do themselves any good, and has the potential to do others a measure of harm. Seems like a writer should be more concerned with their own writing than with whether other writers are Doing Writing Right.

So... that went a little longer than I meant to go. But then I've been sitting on some of these thoughts all week and they just sort of exploded when I read Hurley's piece and felt this grateful wave of Yes! You get it! in response. That tends to make me wordy.

Anyway. Tomorrow there will be a new Fictionette and also progress on the story-in-revision. See you then.