author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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.

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.

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.

Today was full of sucky things. There was waking up with the same sore throat I went to bed with and realizing that it had invited its friend, the runny nose, over to stay the week. There was that beautiful and completely legal hit to the sternum that I took during roller derby practice that had me asking myself that question no one ever likes to ask themselves, "Is it a bruised bone or is it a broken bone?" (When blocking backwards, always turn your shoulder in toward the incoming hit. I mean, I knew this, but apparently it takes damn near injury to drive the lesson home.)

And then there was that same roller derby practice called off early due to a fire less than a mile away. (Our first clue was all of the power in the building going out, leaving us in pitch dark. Our second was when we opened the garage door to let light in, and we saw the big column of smoke to the south and west of us. Apparently some railroad ties at 1st and Martin were ablaze, and the fire burned through the power lines.)

But today also had a very lovely thing in it. It's a review of NAMELESS #3 on Amazon. Apparently the reviewer thought highly enough of my story to include it with those he singled out for specific praise:

"Lambing Season" is a thriller that stands on its own two legs and is as original as I have read....nothing like that one out there!

Between the head cold and the very sore sternum (and also the waking up early tomorrow to take my sore sternum to someone who can answer the above question), I'm going to bed early tonight. But! As I do so, I'll be hugging that sentence like a teddy bear while I drift off into happy dreams.

Dear world: I am taking a day off from you. It is rather late in the day to decide that, admittedly. But as much day as I have left in this day, it is not an on day. It is an off day.

I had lovely great ambitions when I woke up on the train arriving in Denver this morning. I even spent the last 25 minutes before it backed up into the station working on the "Impact of Snowflakes" rewrite. Then I bussed home, did my AINC reading, and accompanied John on some errands... and then I just crashed. Was simply exhausted. Spent the time between 3:45 and 5:30 PM dead asleep, so very hard asleep that when I woke up I wasn't sure where I was nor why I'd set an alarm.

Managed to shake that lethargy off in time for roller derby practice, and roller derby practice was invigorating as usual. But that was pretty much it. I am not going to pull out some heroic maneuver to get "Snowflakes" into the WOMEN DESTROY HORROR! slush pile nor reach my 5 hours of writing for the day. I am not going to put myself under that kind of pressure, not when myself gave me a clear signal that what myself needs is rest.

Tomorrow will be a full writing day (with derby at the end of it), and Friday is my new deadline for "Snowflakes" (because it's doable, and we can't just let these things linger). My alarm is set for a work-a-day rise-and-shine kind of morning. Tonight, however, I am clocking out. I'm going to curl up in bed with a book and enjoy being in a bed that belongs to adult-me, is not being towed across the country on rails, and that also contains my husband, whom I have missed this past week-and-a-bit.

Message ends. Niki signing out.

And I don't want to be tired. Certainly not while I'm in New Orleans. I want to save up all my tired and spend it during the train ride Monday and Tuesday, when I'll have nothing better to do than sleep. Well, and write, of course. But it is an utter waste of opportunity to be tired while I'm here.

Although I suppose I have reason. My agenda while I'm staying with my parents tends to look something like this:

1. Wake up at 7 AM. Drink coffee¹. Do Morning Pages. Visit with Mom and Dad, and also Mom's friend who comes to swim in the mornings, before everyone leaves for work.
   
2. Go to all the places! Run all the errands! Often by bike!
   
3. Eat all the things! (Today, all the things involved shrimp. It's a Friday in Lent.)
   
4. Weather permitting, do a little skating. "A little" today meant "about a mile and a half along the Lakefront Trail from the Bonnabel Pumping Station to the Bucktown Marsh and back, and also do it NOW before the rain blows in."
   
5. More visiting. More eating. More drinking.
   
6. Fall over exhausted around 9:00 PM.

Tonight's visiting involved accompanying my Dad on his weekly dinner and Bourré session (with house rules for ante and bourré penalty) with his sisters and their families. They kept me up way past my bedtime.

Anyway, that's why Niki's so tired.

¹Dad makes coffee every morning. When I'm in town he makes enough for two. Also, at least once or twice during my visit he ends up buying me a beer or mixing me a martini. Dad getting me drinks is one of those weird Signs You're Now a Grown-up that I haven't gotten used to yet and probably never will. (Another is encouragement to call parents' friends and some aunts and uncles by their first names without the accustomed Mr/Miss/Aunt/Uncle honorific.) (back)

I arrived in New Orleans today. Dad picked me up at the train station and drove me back to Metairie, where Mom and a goodly handful of neighbors waited to say hello. Thus, this blog post comes to you from the very comfy location of my childhood bed in my childhood home. Other than a lingering familiar paranoia reawakened by finding a two-inch long cockroach scrabbling noisily in the kitchen sink when I went down for a late night cup of tea, which has me fighting down a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies every time I go to open a cupboard, retrieve stuff from the pantry, or, y'know, set feet to floor, I'm feeling fairly happy.

(This is not an indication of any lack of cleanliness in my parents' household, by the way. This is simply an indication that their house is in the Gulf South. Two-inch long cockroaches are simply a fact of life, which I must face if I ever want to live here full time again. Or even part time.)

The train ride was two nights long, and I managed to just about keep to my five-hour-a-day writing schedule throughout. That's because there's really nothing else on the train to do. Well, other than listen to podcasts, read ebooks and digitally published short stories (downloaded ahead of time because there is no onboard wifi on the California Zephyr), play video games, knit, darn socks, talk to strangers, and space out watching the scenery go by. So! It was easy. Kinda sorta.

I brought my skate bag along, reasoning that since I was going to miss three roller derby practices I might as well get some outside skating time. In Chicago, between trains, I skated from the station over to Sushi Pink for food, sake, and the wifi necessary to get yesterday's blog post up and do various online errands. A man on a street corner saw me coming and shouted, "Hey, what's up, roller derby?" which made me grin. A little girl on another street corner told her mom, "I want to roller skate!" which made me grin even harder.

Today, after greeting practically everyone in the neighborhood and then helping Dad eat all the cold boiled blue crabs he had remaining in the refrigerator, I went for a skate/walk with Mom (me skating, she walking) up the levee and over to the Bonnabel boat launch. Levee access is all open now, and the bike/pedestrian path is smooth as silk. I showed Mom some of the stuff I'm practicing, which I think she appreciated. She hears about roller derby all the time, but she doesn't much get to see it, so I think that, despite the one time she got to watch me scrimmage, she mostly just has this vague idea that "Niki gets to learn how to do new things in skates, which makes her happy, which in turn makes me happy."

So I'm getting skate time in, and I'll try to make it a daily thing. Weather permitting, that is. I'm also going to try to keep to my writing schedule, though I'm not letting HabitRPG hold me to the full five hours until I'm back in Boulder.

And that is all for tonight.

This past week, I realized something else about Morning Pages and why they're useful to me. Put briefly: They're a safe place to indulge uncertainties. Which is to say, I can natter on to myself about how unsure I am, how worried I am, how doubtful I feel, how much I despair. And it's OK, because Morning Pages are not a performance. They're not going to be graded. They aren't the space where I have to be certain, sure, confident, perfect-perfect-perfect. They're a safe place to admit to insecurities.

I haven't readily given myself permission to do that. I'm insecure like woah, but I know I shouldn't be. I'm not allowed to be. So it was sort of an epiphany this past week to realize that it's OK to write down things like "I'm just writing the same thing over and over and over. Is it really doing me any good?" or "Renaming the protagonist of the snow-glue-apocalypse story after the kid in Dr. Seuss's 'Ooblek' story isn't clever, you know." or "It's late. I overslept by a bunch. Is it even worth trying to get the day started at this hour?" or even "I've been trying all weekend not to think about the City of Boulder 'failure to file' tax liability assessment¹ that arrived Friday because I can't do anything about it until offices open later today, but it keeps popping up in my mind and making me feel sick to my stomach, and I really didn't need that on bout day² or while preparing to leave town, as though it weren't hard enough combining bout day with travel prep weekend, right?!"

It's OK to admit to doubts like that on pages no one will read, in a space of time during which I'm not expected to produce.

It's a good thing to do. At the very least, it can't hurt. It's not like forcing myself to relive unpleasant memories on the page, which can sometimes be usefully cathartic but is just as likely to be a needlessly agonizing experience that poisons my mental state for the rest of my day as though the awful incident had only just now happened, and that also poisons the Morning Pages process itself with painful associations that will make me reluctant to do Morning Pages tomorrow, and that ultimately delays a much-needed healing process by ripping the emotional wound wide open to Day 1 status. (This is why I'm less likely to force myself to journal incidents I don't want to think about, and more likely instead to just write, "I'm thinking about something unhappy and unfair and infuriating that happened yesterday. I don't want to be thinking about it. Here is what I would rather be thinking about instead...")

Unlike that, this is harmless. And it's freeing to be able to admit that I'm imperfect. It's freeing to just let myself be imperfect. I'm in a backstage sort of space, where it's OK to allowing myself time for the pre-show worries and nervous breakdowns. And in doing so, I can work through why I'm full of doubts and come up with plans for working through or around the doubts. Having done that, it's more likely I'll actually leave those doubts backstage (on the page) and be able to perform better despite them on the stage (over the course of the rest of my day).

Realizing that it's OK to wibble on the page was also a realization that I needed to have that realization, if that's not too recursive. I just hadn't been acutely aware of how much of my day-to-day stress was coming from the combination of being uncertain and not allowing myself those uncertainties, and therefore not admitting to those uncertainties, even to myself.

So I guess that's the takeaway here: We have to put on a good act for everyone else; why make our jobs harder by trying to fool ourselves too?

¹It's OK, it's all good. "Your actual tax due for those periods, even if it was zero, replaces your liability assessed here." But I did have to take an extra trip downtown, that I didn't really have time for on OMG I GET ON A TRAIN TONIGHT Monday, in order to have a smiling, friendly tax specialist in the municipal building reassure me to my face that "You are OK now." Totally worth it, though. If I'd just mailed my written note, I'd still be worrying, and I'd keep on worrying all through my travel. That face-to-face reassurance was two grand worth of a weight off my mind. (back)

²Bout day went great. No one got injured, neither during the mix-up bout nor during the "B-Team Showdown" as the announcer kept referring to our game. My Bombshells won, and I personally was responsible for two power jams in jam #2 in the first period. (Since the latest rules change, penalties are only 30 seconds long, so a single skater can go to the penalty box multiple times in a single jam.) I can't begin to tell you how proud I am of that. Whenever I feel ashamed of the stupid shit I did--"Fleur, if you come off your line one more time, I'm benching you," ARGH--I remember that, yes, while there are things I still need to work on, I've improved enough to be aware enough and quick enough on my feet to run back and cause the jammer to cut the track. Twice. During my first time out on the track that night. OK, so, maybe I get a Destruction of Pack Major penalty of my own one of those times. But still. Also, our opposing team, the Pikes Peak Derby Dames Slamazons, were a lot of fun to bout against and to party with after. There is proof of this on the internet. I'm not sure what we were doing in that photo. Pretending to be puppies? (back)

Just because I got to the end of my story revision last night didn't mean it was ready to submit.

I mean, there's spell-checking. Which apparently can't be done in the current beta version of Scrivener for Windows. (I am very brave, to beta-test Scrivener with my precious, precious stories. Or very foolish. It's so hard to tell.) So we'll compile to RTF and spell-check that way, making sure to make any corrections in the Scrivener project and not in the RTF.

Then there's reading the story out loud to myself, stopping every few sentences to cringe at the awkwardness and try to figure out how to tidy it up, tighten it down, and make it sound like something a reasonably competent author came up with. And then thinking better of the somewhat related bit three pages ago. And then realizing that the three-pages-ago bit, having been changed, requires a small change six pages ahead.

At some point, the thought occurs to me that three thousand and some-odd words shouldn't take this long to read aloud. We'll brush that thought under the rug because it is not helping.

Then there's another Scrivener-to-RTF compile, another spell-check for the sake of all the bits that got typed anew, and finally a half-hesitant nod of approval from myself to me.

Off to the submissions guidelines web page! Create new email message! Fill in subject header exactly as specified! Fill in correct email address and check it three times! Attach manuscript!

Read the rest of the submissions guidelines. Note, with a sense of "Shouldn't I have noticed this before?" that submissions are read blind, and, as such, attached RTF or DOC manuscripts should have absolutely no identifying information inside.

Open up RTF manuscript. Remove name and contact info from upper-left corner of first page. Remove byline from beneath the title. Remove last name from the header that appears on every page after the first.

Save manuscript.

Attach manuscript to email, replacing previous attachment.

Send email. High-five self. (Tricky, but worth it.) Log submission in personal records and over at The Submissions Grinder. Check off related HabitRPG to-do item and very nearly reach Level 11 thereby.

Realize that, since [MARKET REDACTED] uses a blind submissions process, perhaps I should not be blogging so chattily about how "Anything For a Laugh," which is the story about the [IDENTIFYING CONTENT REDACTED] and whose title I have changed to [NEW TITLE REDACTED], just got sent there today.

But it did just get sent there today. I am pleased.

Now. Back to "Snowflakes" for a few minutes today, with the greatest hopes for getting all the way through it tomorrow and tidying it up over the weekend. It, too, must be submitted by March 31. Working on it tonight is how I'm going to finish my 5 hours. I am going to reach my 5 hours, darn it, even though I have to be up until 1:00 AM to do it.

*hangs head*

Look, I had ever so many good intentions for starting early today. But I didn't get much sleep last night. And no, it wasn't because I was up late playing addictive games. It was because all my roller derby playing bits were sore, with a stealth soreness that doesn't make itself usefully known until I've been tossing and turning and almost drifting away and then waking up again to wonder, "Why am I not sleeping?" and then realizing "Oh, it's because of what feels like a deep tissue bruise on my right arm that yelps when I lie on my right side, and the aching muscle of the inner left thigh that's yelping every time I roll over. And also, I have a headache." At which point I drag myself out of bed and take two ibuprofin, knowing that they won't actually start doing me any good until it's wake-up time. And then it's wake-up time, and I'm only just starting to enjoy sweet, sweet unconsciousness, so I say, "Eff it, I'm not going to stop now that I'm getting good at it." And I turn off my alarm clock.

And that's how oversleeping happened this morning. Also, my imaginary dog ate my homework.

But I did get that story submitted though. Hooray!