author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of which leads to...

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

So that's happening. And now you know.

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

Hello the blog! I have an announcement for y'all: TOMORROW, March 16, I will be a guest reader on ephemera.

ephemera is a dreamy Toronto-based reading series (which has gone virtual for the same reason everything post-2020 has gone virtual) chaired by KT Bryski and Jen Albert. It's held the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. It typically features three guest author readings and a performance, all stitched together by the hosts' quirky continuity shenanigans. I have no idea what those shenanigans will consist of this time; the Twitter announcement says "BRING-YOUR-OWN-THEME" which could mean anything.

How this came about is, last year I worked with KT Bryski on the podcast of "Survival, After." I was, and am, immensely grateful to her for giving me the opportunity to narrate my story for that podcast, and grateful again that she remembered my work positively enough to invite me to be part of her show. And now that I've listened to a few older episodes and read the notes for a few more, I find myself gently wibbling to the tune of "Holy shit they've had some big name authors on this show!!! What the heck am I doing here?!" So it all feels very star-studded and amazing.

Anyways, I'll be reading a ten-minute miscellany of poems and flash fiction which aren't connected by any particular theme at all, except perhaps that they are all A. tiny, and B. hard-to-find: it's all stuff that either isn't online at all (due to being published in a print-only publication) or can only be found with the help of the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" (due to the online publications they were published in having been discontinued). The poems are relatively new. The flash stories are relatively old, but I'm still proud and fond of 'em.

Again, the show will be TOMORROW - Wednesday, March 16 - at 7:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM Mountain, and, as things currently stand, I'm scheduled to read first. You can tune in live or watch it later via the YouTube channel.

In other news: I'll be appearing on Story Hour again on May 25, and (keeping things vague until contracts are signed) I appear to have sold another poetry reprint. The technical issues I lamented last time appear to be all cleared up; Space Invader has been working perfectly since it returned home. And this week is tryouts week as my roller derby league prepares a roster for our first competitive game (i.e. versus another league, that league being Pikes Peak Derby Dames of Colorado Springs) since 2019.

Tomorrow: the Friday Fictionette round-up for January. As soon after that as possible: the Friday Fictionette round-up for February. (Have I mentioned I am very, very tired of being constantly behind schedule. Well. I will soon have more time in my week to deal with things--but about that, more later.)

Hell yeah! "More tomorrow" actually happened! It probably wouldn't have happened if a friends date hadn't fallen through, leaving me at loose ends for the evening, but the evening I can't make lemonade out of those lemons is the evening when THE LEMONS WERE A LIE anyway.

(When and why did we decide "lemon" was slang for "a bad deal"? Lemons are tasty! They smell nice too! A bit of lemon juice in my water bottle before roller derby practice and my hydration improves significantly!)

So, briefly, to report on the Recalibrated Catch-Up Project: I'm still on track. For the November 19 release, Step 2 ("the real draft") was not finished on Day 2, but I did finish it up on Day 3. It's getting uploaded tonight or at the very latest tomorrow morning, and then it goes live on Friday.

Sometimes a story doesn't come together easily at all. Doesn't matter how long or short the story; anything from flash to 6K has the potential to be either a breeze or an ordeal. The November 19 Friday Fictionette was an ordeal, though not as "ordeally" as November 12 was. (No surprises there. November 12 was a novel-length idea I was trying to compress down to flash. Which: No.) And the difference between an ordeal and a breeze is in the answer to the question "Can I write a full draft in a single setting?" Or, for longer stories, "Can I go the entire session without hitting the 'I don't know what to write next' wall?"

I have a Process. It goes like this:

1. Think about the story.
2. Write the story.
3. Stop thinking about the story.
4. Write more of the story.
5. Return to Step 1.

That's kind of glib and not precisely accurate. It's more like, I have two active modes, which are "thinking about the story" and "writing the story," and I switch between the two when I get to the end of the progress I can make via the one I'm on.

Frustratingly, through, sometimes I can't make progress in either mode. That's when the passive mode, Step 3 above, comes into play. Go do something else. Think about something else. Better yet, go to sleep. Stop thinking about the story and let the story think about itself for a while.

This is what makes a compressed schedule for Friday Fictionettes such a challenge. If I'm trying to get one finished in three days or less, well, there's only two sleeps it can benefit from.

I tried to account for that these past few days by scheduling myself two specific sessions per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. (Monday and today, it worked well. Yesterday was trickier because I had roller derby practice, but I was able to turn the 20-minute drive into an active "thinking about the story" session, which got me a plan for this morning's "writing the story" session.) And today I got the last bit untangled during a sort of mix of thinking and not thinking--I mean, I planned to go for a walk and actively think about the story, but mostly I just thought about the crows and the hawk that I saw.

tl;dr - If I've only got three days to work on a story, my best bet is to turn each day into two or three mini-days. It worked this time, anyway.

Speaking of derby, I have derby news! We are hosting a public bout on January 8. You can find all the details on Facebook: Preps vs. Goths! January 8! Doors at 5 PM, First Whistle at 6!. "Preps vs. Goths" is the theme for the adult bout, but there will also be a JUNIORS bout (theme: Freaks vs. Geeks) and we couldn't be more proud!

Here is the online ticket sales page. Extra special hint from me to you: Using the discount code "Fleur" (as in, the short form of my derby name) to get $2 off the price of your ticket! (Discount code is caps-sensitive. Upper-case "F", lower-case "leur".)

(Do go read the FB event page; you don't have to have a Facebook log-in to read it, and that's where the most up-to-date COVID protocols for the event can be found. Those details will most likely be evolving between now and bout day, so keep an eye on it.)

Ha. So remember that "long and deeply satisfying skating session" last week? Well, it turns out that when I kick my own butt skating for three hours straight, including over less than hospitable terrain (the sidewalks! OMG, the sidewalks on the east side of 28th Street! Whyyyyy?), and then the very next day I take part in an exceedingly ambitious 40-minute HIIT workshop that's heavy on the same muscles I wore out skating the day before, the result is several days of being pretty much good for nothing but whining.

I have been a little more cautious in my daily workout since.

I mean, I'm still trying to have a daily workout. That has been my goal for March. A year of no roller derby has meant fewer hours of physical activity per week, and lower-quality exercise when I do exercise because I'm not a particularly strict self-coach. My endurance has suffered, and so has my strength, both in terms of both ability and muscle mass/definition. I am a pathetic noodle during the league's Thursday night Zoom workouts. I've put on weight, and though weight is a number that never meant much to me before, it says something when that number's the highest it's ever been in my adult life. (I've never paid much attention to BMI either, except to note that it, like one's credit score, is a metric that is notorious for being misused, with malice aforethought, to make people's lives measurably worse. But realizing that my current BMI might qualify me for the COVID vaccine a little earlier than I had hitherto expected is just weird.) And my blood pressure, which metric does mean quite a lot to me, has been up a titch. So! Daily exercise is my current goal.

Yesterday's exercise was going to be skating, but I left it for too late, and now it's going to be snowing through the weekend. Yuck. So yesterday's exercise was an extremely modest amount of squats, sit-ups, crunches, knee-lifts, and leg-lifts. Like, fifteen minutes, all told. Not an impressive session. Enough to say there was a non-zero amount of exercise in the day, which is the main thing. Today will be similar. Then tomorrow, being a Thursday, will kick my butt again, but because I won't come to Thursday's workout with a pre-kicked butt, I should be functional the next day.

Which is all very much the long way of saying "No, I haven't gotten back to the revision of 'Lambing Season' yet, sorry." I'm going to put that sucker to the side for now, though, because I would very much like to have a horror original to send to Nightmare Magazine when it opens to all demographics for the week of the 14th. And I know just the story. I think I can get it revised in time, but I need to start today.

(Oh, look! They'll take poetry that week, too!)

Meanwhile, I promised you a recipe. Or a method. Or a something involving chicken, mushrooms, asparagus, and cream. Here, then, is that something.

Step One: Read this. Then put it away. We're not so much following a recipe as improvising on an idea. This recipe is the idea. Also preheat the oven to 350.

Step Two: The big cast-iron pan. Bacon in little chunks. Medium heat until greasy.

Step Three: Chicken breasts, liberally coated on both sides in LOTS of fresh ground pepper (seriously, this makes the dish) and a little salt, on top of the bacon. While they sear, sliced onions and mushrooms on top of that. Eventually, when that first side has cooked enough, flip the chicken, let the other side cook a bit. Then slice it into slices. Introduce those slices more thoroughly to the onions and mushrooms and also the heat.

Step Four: Now what? You want to boil some pasta, but your chicken onion mushroom mess is taking up the burner you want to use! Guess you'd better just shove that whole cast iron pan into the oven along with the crawfish bread. (The crawfish bread was why we preheated the oven in the first place.) Problem solved! Now boil up that pasta.

Step Five: While the pasta's cooking, check on the pan in the oven. Add some cream to the liquid being released from the mushrooms. It'll look a bit like cream of mushroom soup. That's fine. Let it boil down. When convenient, return the pan to the stovetop and the heat to medium-high. Add more cream if you want. It's sort of a balancing act between "is it thick enough" (no? cook it longer) and "is it creamy enough" (no? add cream). The flow chart also includes "can you wait any longer?" (no? eat it).

We are not worrying about the chicken. The chicken isn't getting overcooked or dry in this mess. The chicken is getting braised.

Step Six: So the sauce is the right consistency, the pasta is waiting to be introduced to it, you're ready to eat. BUT WAIT! There's asparagus! Toss it into the sauce and leave it on the heat only as much longer as it takes to get the asparagus cooked to your taste. Then: remove from heat, sprinkle with parmesan, and toss it all about so the parmesan gets melty.

And now it's done. Serve it over that pasta. Eat it all. Lick the bowl. And save a little bread to mop up the pan. The sauce is really tasty.

Dear Diary: Today is a Red Letter Day! I have got up on time and done all my writing (excepting this Very Important Missive) by four of the clock in the Afternoon. As you might Imagine, this has left me simply oodles of daylight and evening for all sorts of Pleasant Pastimes...

*Ahem.* No, seriously, it's been great. I had a long and deeply satisfying skating session outside, taking advantage of this single perfect day between snowstorms when enough of the previous storm's accumulations of ice have melted away to allow for rolling, but the next storm hasn't yet started. Then I came home and logged into Story Hour to hear Meg Elison and Gabriela Santiago read their glorious and heartwrenching tales. (I was very good and did not get any tears on my cross-stitching.) And now I am pleasantly ensconced in the bath with a beer, writing this blog post and letting my poor abused adductor muscles relax.

You may recall my announcing an upcoming appearance on Story Hour. That is scheduled for May 5. I suggest you make this Zoom or Facebook livestream part of your weekly routine, so that by the time that date rolls around it'll simply be habit and you'll be able to catch it easily. Story Hour airs each Wednesday at 7:00 PM Pacific Time and runs for an hour, with two authors reading for half an hour each. I know that's pretty darn late for y'all in the Eastern time zone; if you can't catch it live--or even if you can!--you'll be able to watch the archived video on Facebook whenever you like.

Today was also weird and surprising in that we got some windfall groceries. Some chicken breasts, mushrooms, asparagus, and heavy cream that no one at this address asked for are in the fridge now, and there's a packet of sliced almonds and some shallots in the pantry. John ordered his usual game night snack food supplies from Safeway, and they brought him the wrong order. Unfortunately, this means John doesn't get chocolate and potato chips during tonight's Apex Legends session. On the other hand, I'm now plotting a creamy pasta dish for after tomorrow evening's BCB workout. Of course I will share the details with you. Probably in tomorrow night's blog post.

(I'll probably save the shallots to do the caramelized shallot, anchovy, and tomato paste sauce/spread again. That stuff was excellent. I finished off the leftovers by spreading it on the toast I made an open-face green onion omelet with.)

"But what about the story?" I hear you cry. "The one that was tying you up into guilt-ridden knots and revision angst?" Yes, well, never fear, I did not shirk my duty. Avoidance came calling, but I said "Not today, avoidance!" and got right to it. I read the manuscript through carefully and left myself nearly a thousand words of margin notes. That sounds kind of daunting, but I'm honestly not sure I'm going to act on the majority of those notes. It is an extremely imperfect story in many ways, and in many ways it will remain imperfect. I don't want to set myself the task of making an entirely new story out of it except at dire need.

And the need may not be so dire. The themes of dehumanization are more evenly balanced than I remembered; it's the (presumed white) townspeople who have the first episode of inhuman aggression. (That would be the scene where the stranger rolls through town and is careless at a 4-way stop.) And I think that once I fix the beginning, and of course those bits directly affected by the change in the beginning, certain resonances will emerge to shift the balance away from the "white neighbors friendly, brown shepherds scary" dynamic, and more towards "Oh, shit, another group of people I came to trust that I suddenly can't trust. Maybe I can't trust myself, either."

All right, I'm not happy about Bob making the racist joke about worshipping cows in India. If I leave it in, it's gonna need some pushback. I think I know how to do that, but I'll have to see how the fix looks on the page.

Anyway. Not saying I'm perfectly satisfied that the limited changes I'm now planning will fix everything. But I am willing to start out with just those changes, and then to see where things stand.

So that's the state of the rerprint revisions. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope to give you more good news (and possibly a recipe) tomorrow.

My social life is entirely on Zoom. Increasingly, my working life, too. It's not a bad thing, honestly.

I just got finished about an hour ago with the Boulder County Bombers Thursday night Zoom workout. Sometimes skaters will bring their own workout to share, other times they'll find an official video from this or that trainer. Either way, we get to see each other and sweat together and turn our bodies into wet noodles of exhaustion with only each other as witnesses. Tonight, we ventured way back to 2009, the very early days of the modern roller derby era for Roller Derby Workout with The Heart Attacks (link goes to YouTube trailer, which contains an outdated link; try this Etsy page instead).

It was... very dated. A lot more Jazzercize than punk. Not a tattoo to be seen, nor much variation in body type or skin color. The patter assumes only she/her pronouns in the audience, and yet the camera angles demonstrate a dedication to the hetero male gaze. Like, yep, that sure is a close-up of a woman's buttocks in very short shorts, isn't it? And not really in a "Check out how strong and toned your bum can be!" way, either. (Maybe it was actually meant for the queer female gaze on the sly? Maybe that was how they got queerness past the censors, so to speak.)

But at the same time, it was a damn good workout. It was a roller derby workout, targeting all the roller derby muscle groups. Lots of core, abs, hams, quads, glutes. Lots of squats, leg-lifts, and derby stance. Lots of "I don't think I could have held a one-legged squat this long during the height of my derby career, let alone one year into the pandemic!" moments. I may just order a copy of that DVD for my own library so I can memorize the exercises for the next time I get to lead a Phase 1 class.

So that was tonight's workout. Now I am recovering in a hot bath with a beer and a bowl of chole, the spicy garbanzo dish included in this fantastic cooking presentation. And I'm writing this blog post, because writing in the bath is what I do, some evenings.

Usually I'm writing at the desk in the second bedroom, which we've kitted out into an office. And more and more lately I'm writing during Zoom co-writing sessions.

It turns out, I really need structure in my day in order to have any kind of time management. Best is if I can replicate the routine of Going To Work. For a little while, years ago, I had a membership to a co-working space in downtown Boulder so that I had to Go To The Office. But it turned out I had little to no tolerance for other people in my workspace. I couldn't tune out conversations and other people's music, not even if I used headphones. So I went back to slouching across the house over to the home office instead. And I can make that work, but it's difficult to force myself to adhere to a schedule when it seems like it hardly matters if I don't.

Then, not long ago--maybe a little before the pandemic? I think?--I discovered Cat Rambo's Patreon; and from there, their Discord community; and from there, their Zoom co-writing sessions. These are great. Everyone says hi, shares a little about what they're working on, then mutes their microphones and works for 30 minutes. At the end of 30 minutes, everyone says how they're coming along, and then they go right back to it. In all, it's three 30-minute sessions dedicated to whatever on your agenda needs it, helped along by a little mutual accountability and leavened with a touch of socializing.

That. That there. That is my Office. On an ideal day, I will wake up in time to do my morning pages, then have breakfast and do all the morning routines, then log onto the morning co-writing session for 9:30 AM Mountain Time. It ends around 11:15 or so. I take a lunch break, do some household chores, maybe do a little cross-stitching by the sunny south-facing window or play video games. There's another co-writing session at 2:00 PM Mountain Time, and by the time that ends, the majority of my work for the day is done! It's magical.

And then, on Sunday afternoons, SFWA hosts a co-writing session too! This is something that started with their online Nebula Conference last year and just continued. Each week a different author or editor hosts. It follows a similar pattern to Rambo's sessions, but the break-time check-in and socializing between their two 45-minute work periods happens in Zoom break-out rooms, in groups of five or six people. Sunday afternoon SFWA writing dates were how four out of five of my Weekend Warrior stories got written. (The one where I missed the writing date was just harder, that's all.)

So that is my current time management plan. I've found an external system of structure and accountability, and it's great. It's not going to be everyone's deal--everyone's process is different, and no one's wrong so long as the writing gets writ--but if it sounds like something that might help you, then you can...

• Join Cat Rambo's Patreon at any tier
• Register for the virtual 2020 Nebula Conference and enjoy all its year-round programming

And those are my current thoughts on time management.

In these weeks since Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 went live, they've been publishing a series of Author Spotlight features on their website, focusing on the contributors to that issue. Mine just went up today!

In it, among other things, I reveal a little of how "Reasonable Accommodations" came to be written. I tell probably the briefest version ever of my How I Fell In Love With Roller Derby story. I also give a shout-out to the two teachers who gave me an early education in how freelance writing and publishing works. I didn't name them in the Author Spotlight, probably because I was trying to be brief, but those two wonderful humans are Betsy Petersen and Chet Day. I gave them a shout-out also, nearly ten years ago, in the blog-up to the announcement of my very first pro sale. I really do owe them so much.

I had the pleasure of running into Ms. Petersen on campus, during Alumni Weekend, on the occasion of my high school class's 25-year reunion. (And here I'll pause to acknowledge how very, very lucky the class of 1994 was. If we had been the class of 1995, we couldn't have had our reunion--or worse, we'd have probably gone ahead with it anyway, and become another superspreader statistic.) We watched the high school play together, a performance of Mamma Mia! starring some of her current students, and I got to tell her during the intermission about my recent publications and successes. I felt like such a kid, so needy to show my teacher how I'd done good with what she taught me! I get like that a little around my first roller derby trainers too. Look how good I can skate backwards, y'all! Look how bravely I can do a turn-around toe-stop these days! And without falling down and smashing my face anymore!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my Author Spotlight interview at Departure Mirror Quarterly. And if you haven't read Issue 2 yet, go download yourself a free ebook copy! Lots of great stuff in there.

It occurs to me that I entirely forgot to promote my blog in that interview. I did mention the Friday Fictionettes Project, and I'm going to mention it here too because finally all the December releases are out. (Jan 1 is out, too, and Jan 8 will probably go up Friday.) So it's time for a Friday Fictionette Round-up:

• December 4, 2020: "Hostage" (ebook, audio) In which extraterrestrial ex-boyfriends are the worst.
• December 11, 2020: "Always Make Sure to Put Your Toys Away" (ebook, audio) In which things don't always stay put in the place you left them.
• December 18, 2020: "Culture Clash" (ebook, audio) In which human social taboos are incomprehensible and also toxic to visitors.
• December 25, 2020: "Good Intentions" (ebook, audio) In which it is, once again, a thoroughly bad idea to try to change history. This is the Fictionette Freebie for December 2020!

My big idea to catch up to schedule is to try to release two fictionettes a week. This has not happened. I am still about four weeks behind. I can get one release completed over three or four days, but then I find it weirdly hard to get any writing done Friday through Sunday. I'll be getting my Sundays back, though, having written this past weekend my fifth and final contest entry story for Weekend Warrior (see previous). Maybe that'll help. Maybe I'll be smart and use the time I had been using for Weekend Warrior stories, for Friday Fictionette production. Maybe!

Tomorrow (assuming I get to blogging tomorrow) - I have thoughts on structure and time management! They aren't brilliant! Also I cooked a thing! Aren't you just in all the suspense? Stay tuned.

My roller derby league is challenging its members to skate an ULTRAMARATHON IN MAY. There are sponsors, there will be prizes, there is certainly competition. And I can tell you right now, I am not likely to complete even Tier 1. I'll keep track of my miles, but I have pretty much zero ambition about it.

But now I'm curious. I have been doing a fair amount of street skating recently (if somewhat less over the past couple weeks since it's been raining off and on). How much of it am I doing? At the rate I'm doing it, how long will take me to accumulate 26.2 miles of skating?

What if all the skating I was doing was to pick up take-out meals?

(Could I stop using GrubHub entirely? There are so many reasons.)

Could I SKATE A TAKE-OUT MARATHON?

Last week Tuesday, the day that I and my computer received a visit from that onsite tech who was a total tool, I got it in my head to skate to My Ramen & Izakaya. I began placing the order online on the backup laptop while the tech finished up with my Dell Inspiron and prepared to leave. I hadn't quite finished placing the order when the computer stalled out in its attempt to load Windows. While the tech yelled at Dispatch over the phone, I stared longingly at the computer screen. Then I put on my gear and rolled around the house gathering facemask, bluetooth headphones, and wallet. The instant the tech left, I hit SUBMIT on my take-out order and rolled the heck out of there. I figured, by now, between the tech visit gone wrong and the exercise I was currently getting, I would deserve my tantanmen ramen and Japanese pancakes. And yes, I did deserve those tasty treats, even if I probably shouldn't have eaten them all in one sitting. I went to bed painfully full but very happy. Or, at least, considering the loss of the use of my good laptop, more happy than I would have been otherwise.

Distance skated: 1.58 miles.

That worked out so well, I thought I'd do it again yesterday. Only this time I was in the mood for Buddha Thai. John was game--I could put him down for medium-spicy tofu pad thai any old evening. Me, I got the drunken noodles with seafood combo. I skated there mostly along the streets, taking advantage of bike lanes and multi-use sidewalks. At the restaurant, I took off my wrist guards and donned the disposable gloves that the restaurant had made available on a table outside the door. I put the entrees into my old Rock Boat soft-side thermal tote and poured the Thai iced tea into my old Einstein Bros. to-go mug with lid. Then there was a minimal amount of cross-stepping across a corner of lawn after skating over to the nearest trash receptacle to dispose of the gloves and the plastic cup and straw. Then, back home to stuff myself silly!

Distance skated: 1.20 miles.

At this rate, I will probably not skate a take-out marathon in May. But if I do this instead of ordering delivery more often, I will certainly be getting good exercise to go along with my tasty food!