author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

From the Amtrak to the BX, from the station straight to work. John and I just got back this morning on a train from Chicago, having spent a fantastically action-packed Memorial Day weekend there. A night spent in sleeping accommodations meant we were well-rested and ready to get back to our respective jobs pretty much the moment we pulled in.

For both of us, since May 17, our respective jobs are primarily in downtown Boulder. Which is to say: John took a position with a small programming start-up in a location he can bus, bike, or even walk to (in good weather and with 45 minutes to spare), and I happily rearranged my own writing routine such that I accompany him there most days. He goes to the office, and I go to some place quiet and endowed with electrical outlets and wi-fi. Maybe I do my Morning Pages on a bench by the creek, maybe pull out the laptop and do some freewriting, until the Boulder Public Library opens at 10:00. (Once I gave into temptation and spent the pre-library hour at Tee & Cakes. Hard on the wallet. Easy on the yummm.) Maybe I spend the hours until lunch working on Demand Studios articles in the upstairs quiet zone. Maybe I meet John for lunch, if he has time. Maybe we try a downtown establishment with an interesting lunch special. Maybe we make lunch. (I bought bento boxes! I want to fill them up with Stuff!) Maybe I go to Atlas Purveyors for the afternoon stretch, working on short stories and blogging gigs if there's time.

That's a lot of maybe. The definitely is, I go to work. And I work.

It helps to leave the house to go to work; I don't end up running errands or cleaning the house or chasing the cats instead of writing. It helps even more to leave in the company of someone who's heading to work himself. Self-discipline is largely a matter of mindset, and the morning go-to-work routine changes a mindset. Also, this is my first time since 2004 working roughly in the same location as my husband; I'd forgotten how much I'd missed commuting together, going to lunch together, simply being nearby rather than at opposite ends of a highway.

Today, we got off the BX, walked to his office, stowed our luggage, and then went our separate ways: he to renew his Diet Coke supply, me to order a pot of pu erh at Atlas. I had a lot to do, so it was best to spend the day all in one place. Atlas are very hospitable to all-day work sessions, even bums like me who buy one pot of tea and re-steep it all day long.

(Atlas recently got a hilariously absurd negative review on Yelp.com. The owner blew it up, printed it out, and enshrined it on the wall-to-wall chalkboard for all to enjoy.)

It felt weird how normal everything felt today, being back in Boulder, getting back to work. I mean, last night I went to sleep somewhere in Nebraska. Yesterday morning I woke up in Chicago. I guess traveling has to bring you back home sometime, but the transition was so seamless that I barely noticed it, making Boulder feel a strange place to be.

Then I thought, "You know what's really weird? That 'normal' means calling this cafe my office for the day, watching people walk by, writing stories half the day and paid article gigs the other half. And calling somewhere else my office tomorrow."

Then things got really circular. I stopped thinking and went back to writing.

Today's fiction task: write down the zombie story I've been entertaining in my head all weekend long. If you followed the links above, you'll have found one to Tee & Cakes's short story contest (here's their original announcement). The three words that were the story prompt put me in mind of nothing so much as Popcap.com's "Plants vs. Zombies" game (though I admit playing it during any downtime with John this weekend helped). So it's a bit of a pastiche on that, and a bit of a spoof on popular expectations about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It also incorporates something I learned about chickens a couple weeks ago at Abbondanza.

The result is now in Tee & Cakes's inbox. If it doesn't make the cut, I think I just might send it to Weird Tales.

And that's the news.

I'm an hour into today's work on the Melissa's Ghost retype, which took a surprising amount of tech savvy to enable. The why of that may be summarized thusly:

Running Word Perfect 5.1 (for DOS) on Windows 7.

I got a new laptop recently. It's another Dell Inspiron 15. It differs from my previous Dell Inspiron 15 in that it meets certain required criteria such as having a CD/DVD-ROM that functions and a chassis that isn't coming apart at the corners and video drivers (I think it's the video drivers) that do not cause the computer to crash when I switch from AC power to battery power. Also enough processor speed and memory that simple multitasking doesn't bring the whole system to a crawl.

These are important concerns. And then there's this other key difference: the new laptop is running Windows 7. My previous ran XP. The world of 64-bit operating system is entirely new to me as of May 2010. And it became a scary, scary place when I copied over WP 5.1 from the old laptop to the new and discovered that it would not run.

I should have been prepared. I should have read this article. I hadn't. It's on my to-do list.

At this point, it's not unreasonable to ask, as some have, why I persist in using WP 5.1 in the year 2010. Well. The answer is somewhere between "Because it is a superior piece of word processing software" and "Rawr you kids back in my day rawr get off my lawn." It goes something like this:

It's 1992. I'm a sophomore in high school. I'm taking as an elective course a semester-long writing workshop in the fancy-dancy computer lab. The computer lab is full of Macs. The computer my parents just bought is a PC running Windows 3.1. To work on the same document at home on Microsoft Works and at school on MS Word for Mac requires a very clunky conversion process. I complain, I am overheard, I am soon the proud owner of a quietly pirated copy of Word Perfect 5.1. MS Word for Mac can convert from and to WP 5.1 for DOS. Life is good.

Almost 20 years later, just about everything I've ever seriously written is in WP 5.1 format. Open Office will read that natively, sure, but I don't want to use Open Office as my writing studio. I'm 20-years familiar with WP 5.1. I've got it's weird commands mostly memorized. I am accustomed to a mouse-free, keyboard-only environment. The blocky, monospace on-screen font fades into the background for me. And the mental shift I get from writing in a DOS-based environment helps stave off the distraction of knowing that the entire Internet is waiting for me to drop in and waste the day away.

Put simply: I'm used to WP 5.1, I'm comfortable there, and it's as close to the bare essence of words on a page as I can get while still using a word processor at all. That's the experience I want, and I don't care if Windows 7 is going to be all snobby about 20-year-old software.

So I spent a bunch of time on Google, discovered DOSBox, then figured out how to reconfigure its keyboard commands so it would quit stomping on Word Perfect's keyboard commands, and then belatedly discovered the above-mentioned website with its clear and sophisticated instructions on how to do what I did only much better and more easily and felt very, very silly. But that doesn't matter! I get to do this!

So that on the left is yWriter, the novel-editing software I spent most of November 2009 inside. On the right is DOSBox running WP 5.1, in which I'm typing up the new draft. And running along the top left is FocusBooster, a timer application.

And that's my current writing environment. Ta-da!

Remember yesterday's overwrought, overstretched metaphor? "So it's like a seedling nursery, right? Only it's in suspended animation." It's exactly like that, actually.

So I do the Twitter thing. My blog posts broadcast there via RSS, and I get downright tweet-headed when I'm on a train or at a convention. And sometimes I tweet the "Story Idea du Jour"--for example, this.

The Story Idea du Jour comes directly out of this daily routine I'm working on, where I sit down with the task of writing something new, something so brand-new that I don't even know what it's going to be until it's done. It is very self-reassuring to come up with a shiny new story idea daily. It reaffirms the known but hard-to-keep-hold-of fact that story ideas don't run out. Truly they don't. Ideas are not only a dime a dozen, they're growing on trees. And the more I force myself to come up with new ones, the easier it is to come up with new ones.

"Coming up with ideas" isn't quite right. I'm coming up with ideas all the time without even trying. I'd wager tomorrow's breakfast that we all do. The trick is recognizing them as ideas and not reflexively rejecting them. Morning Pages are also good for fomenting the habit of recognition and breaking the habit of rejection: Keep the pen moving. Don't stop for three pages. Recognize each thought and transcribe it. Don't audition your thoughts against some "worth writing about" yardstick. Write them all down. So with story ideas. What's in your head right now this second? That right there, yes, that, that's a story idea. Pay it some attention. Play with it.

When I started my 25-minute timer, I was also timing some cupcakes in the oven. (We had a cupcake-designing party for April Fool's Day. We had some icing left over. How do you use up leftover icing? You make more cupcakes.) 25 minutes to freewrite on some idea or other; 25 minutes to bake cupcakes. Isn't it great how these things work out? But in any case, after beating together flour and sugar and milk and shortening and so on, after pouring out batter into little paper cups inside the six spaces on a muffin tin, my head was full of cupcake. In fact, what my head kept saying was, "The little cupcake that could."

Isn't that awesome? "The Little Cupcake That Could." That's awesome. But--what the crap is it about?

Twenty-five minutes later, it was about some esoteric ingredient masquerading as extra flour, bought at a questionable shop that happened to be convenient on the way home from a particularly hassled day at work, that got baked into cupcakes, that got served at a ten-year-old's birthday party, that changed the lives of the birthday party attendants forever. Years later, something terrible happens to one of them, and this brings the whole group together, and they have to find out what has been done to them and what it means in their lives now and what choices it puts before them all too soon.

Those little cupcakes? They could.

And then, after 25 minutes, I click "Save and Exit." I forget all about it (except maybe to tweet it, or blog about it briefly) and I move on to another task. I've done my job for the day, as far as the cupcakes are concerned. I've planted a seed in the nursery. You don't sit there watching the ground covering a seed, waiting for it to sprout. You water it and put it somewhere warm and sunny and then you leave it alone.

One day I will look through my file full of Story Ideas du Jour, and the cupcake one will go ping! I'll print it up, make notes, and type a brand new draft about those nefarious cupcakes and those hapless ten-year-olds (and the hapless 20-somethings they became). It'll become the novel or screenplay it was meant to be.

But not today. Today, I'm still working on a story that got planted back in June of last year, that I selected out of the nursery late last week. The one about giant sentient Ants and a rather progressive barista learning how to talk to each other and turn a profit at the same time.

Or something like that.

It's a work in progress.

Today, pedaling away from Abbondanza around 12:45 PM, I had my usual rush of energy and good intentions. Having done a solid four-hour set of physical work in the greenhouse, and seeing the blueness of the sky and the long hours left in the day, I was full of plans. I would have lunch at Oskar Blues in Longmont, as seems to be my new post-farm routine. I would do my morning pages. I would blog. I would knock out a couple of articles for Demand Studios. I would then log onto the Sage ocean and host a cutter pillage from Lincoln to Morannon Island.

Stuff! I would do stuff! None of this going home and crapping out for the whole damn day. Stuff would Get Done! By me!

Then, halfway down my pint of One Nut Brown and two pages into my three, I ran out of steam. The sleepies caught up with me. I finished my pages, paid my check, and fell asleep on the bus somewhere between 63rd and 34th Streets. Once home, I had just enough energy to feed the cats and take a shower. Then I pretty much crapped out for the rest of the day, right on schedule.

And that's why I give myself Mondays off from writing.

But I'm awake now, and here's a nice blog post for you. Let's fill it with overwrought metaphor, shall we? The topic for today: Sifting Soil.

Planting seeds was the order for the day, as it had been all week. They were working on brassicas as I came in, with plans to move to celery next. So our job was to prepare more planting flats. We filled a good 70 flats with sifted soil mix, then brought them to the table to press them down to whatever planting depth was required. Now, celery seeds are itty-bitty, so two of the three varieties being planted wanted a scant 1/8" planting depth. The third variety was pelleted, which is to say that each tiny celery seed is encased in a pinhead-sized ball of clay to make it feasible for use in a certain kind of seed-planting machine. Pellets being bigger, they need more like a 3/16" planting depth. Or so.

So with all those flats, we needed a lot of soil mix. And the pile of sifted mix was getting low. So we sifted more.

Several weeks ago, we'd sifted compost through a screen to get all the clumps and rocks out. This compost was mixed with the other things previously mentioned--vermiculite, manure, organic fertilizer, stuff--and the resulting mix needed to be sifted through a finer screen before it could be used for greenhouse planting. That's what we did today. The finer screen, a sturdy mesh in a wooden frame about the width of an air-hockey table but somewhat shorter, was propped up upon four big upside-down trash cans. We shoveled soil mix on top. Then, gloves on hands, we scrubbed the soil through the screen. Scrub, scrub, scrub! And underneath the screen a faerie-dust drifting of soil accumulated, faster than you'd think, into a great soft pile. Eventually nothing would be left on top of the screen but a bunch of pebbles and clumps the size of rabbit droppings. We tipped those onto the ground for later clean up, shoveled more dirt onto the screen, and repeated the process.

Soil is the basic building block for gardening. For creativity, there's a sort of soil that has to be sifted too. Our life experiences, our hot buttons and emotional triggers, our personal tastes in art, and the catalog of sensation that defines physical existence--these are the raw material. We sift through it constantly, artists being introspective types, and we make preliminary creations out of it all: journal entries, rough sketches, all the five-finger exercises of our craft. Then we mix it up, sift it some more, toss out the clumps and the pebbles that would make it hard for a seed to grow, and we take what's left and we plant things in it so that works of art might grow out of that lovingly prepared soil.

Sometimes I find myself unable to switch mental channels while something unhappy, some frustrating chapter of my life or maybe an infuriating conversation I didn't come out of well, is re-running itself on the back of my eyelids. The instinct is to try to push the thought away. I'll unconsciously start humming to drown out the sound of my thoughts. But it's futile; the re-run has to run its course. If I deny it now, it'll crop back up tomorrow when I'm trying to enjoy a mindless but fun activity. And it won't go away until... shoot, I don't know. It doesn't go away until it goes away. And until it does go away, it's on infinite repeat.

Maybe it would help to imagine the re-runs as simply another iteration of sifting the soil. Maybe each time it's a finer mesh screen, and another layer of blockages and impurities will be scrubbed away. The anger blunts, the guilt recedes, and insights remain behind. Maybe eventually the re-runs of that particular incident will stop, having left me with a fine drift of faerie-dust in the greenhouse of my brain, ready for me to plant a new crop of dreams in.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the same old obsessive brooding that doesn't help anyone. But having a metaphor to view the phenomenon through, even an overwrought metaphor, well, that should make the next re-run season less boring and painful.

A friend of mine wanted to know what it is precisely that I do at Abbondanza. The quick answer is, "Not nearly enough," and probably would be even if I volunteered there every day instead of one morning a week and didn't feel guilty giving the farmers an extra job to do, namely, assigning me tasks and making sure I don't screw them up along with the farm's chances at a successful harvest. But it's not a useful answer. Therefore, I blog.

Writing five days a week gives me a two-day weekend, which I take on Sunday and Monday. Sunday because social stuff tends to get planned then. Mondays because of the farm. I'm a wimp, and after the bus/bike commute and the actual work done, I tend to have no brain. Sometimes I in fact have no consciousness--but that's more of a middle-of-summer thing. During March, the workload is a little less physical and leaves me a little less wiped.

The pace is just as hectic, maybe even more so. March means scrambling to get ready to plant.

My first Monday in 2010 was two weeks ago. There were some miscellaneous clean-up chores needed doing around the greenhouse, where planting would happen, and in the barn, where squash and onions stored from the fall needed sorting and rotating. There were beans to be sorted--there are always beans to be sorted, which means picking out ones that are moldy, cracked, or simply not the right variety. Then we worked on soil.

Soil is important. You can't just dig up dirt from the ground, shove it in planting trays, and call it good. And you can't buy all the potting mix for a season on a shoestring budget. Farming means shoestring budget, unless you're Monsanto I guess, in which case, eff off. (Hey, when you google "Monsanto," one of the first suggestions is "Monsanto evil." That tells you a little something about their public image, I think.) So before you can plant seeds in little trays, you have to make your soil mix. At Abbondanza, this appears to involve homemade compost, a cow manure mix, vermiculite to keep it breathing, and another bag of fertilizer that had fish on the label. The remaining hours of my March 1 were spent sifting the compost through a big screen that had been propped up at about a 45-degree angle. Compost was shoveled through it, and what didn't go through was stomped on to break up the clumps and then shoveled through it again. What didn't go through then got put aside for use as tree mulch or similar.

That was just while I was there. A lot more mixing and sifting would happen before the finished soil mix would be ready for use.

The following week (last week) was spent cleaning trays. Again, if you're on a shoestring budget, you reuse as much as you can. I would reckon that, during my few hours on site, we cleaned about 400 trays, some being 200-cell planting trays and others flat trays to give the cell trays something to sit on without breaking. These trays were set out on screen tables, hosed down, brushed off, hosed some more, turned over, brushed some more, and hosed some more. Then stacked in stacks of 10, sorted by cell size (deep or shallow), and put away. It was a cold morning, so our fingers all ached after the first batch. But then the sun really started coming up, and it felt nice to be working in the wet. I am grateful they had extra rain gear and rubber overalls I could borrow.

This week, actual planting happened. Which will explain the bizarre contraption in the photo included here.

Back up a step. First, we had to fill those cleaned planting-cell trays with soil mix, which isn't as straightforward as it sounds. You don't want the soil compacted too badly, and after all that sifting and mixing the soil is fine enough to get compacted if you just give it a heavy look. Best practice goes something like this:

1. Lay out trays on the ground. Well, on a board. On some tarp.
2. Gently shovel soil over the trays. Use a forward-back motion to distribute it more evenly.
3. Use shovel tip to spread excess over cells that haven't been filled.
4. Use a 2-by-4 to scrape excess off.
5. Lift tray up an inch or two and drop it sharply. This causes the soil to settle.
6. Top off gently with more soil. Scrape excess away.

Finally the trays were ready for seeding. The machine pictured here, the one that looks like a sewing machine with multiple personalities and a can-do attitude, does that. It was made in 1982, did you know that? And they still make the parts. It's like a 1970s-era Cessna or something. Abbondanza recently bought more needles for it. The needles are hollow, like blunt hypodermics. They come in different sizes depending on what size seeds you're using. The row of needles dip into a tray of seeds, grabbing one each (or two if things aren't adjusted perfectly) by the power of suction. Then the needle arm rotates to drop the seeds down a row of funnels. The funnels channel the seeds onto the cells of the planting tray below. Then you move the tray forward so that the funnels are lined up over the next row of cells in time for the whole process to repeat. Supposedly you can get a part that causes the machine to advance the tray automatically, but this not being present the tray was advanced by dint of a careful and patient farmer.

After a tray is seeded, more soil is sifted on top and tamped down. Then it's tagged and laid out for watering. What you see here are three varieties of leeks being put to bed.

And that, friends, is the sort of stuff I do on one of my days off from writing.

For two days running now I've rolled out of bed and up to the desk for two hours' solid fiction work. And I've learned at least two things about this process, thing which were true both this morning and yesterday and thus are likely to remain true going forward:

1. It is the best way to start a day EVAR.
2. By the time I'm done, I reek.

Yesterday was spent at the typewriter finishing the new story, or the new from-the-head draft of old story, depending on how you want to think about it. Today was spent typing the first revision into WordPerfect 5.1. It changed a lot from the one draft to the next. The first part changed tense and, I hope, became more nuanced; the second part incorporated the worldbuilding that went on in my head while I was busy procrastinating. (While it's true that thinking about writing is not writing, it's also true that none of the time thinking about writing is wasted so long as one does, eventually, write.)

Then I sent it off to my critique group. Hitting the SEND button on that email magically unleashed all the feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that until now I'd been successfully repressing. "Oh, Gods, talk about purple prose." "Everyone's going to go 'WHAAAAT?' when they get to this part." "Self-indulgent much?" "The use of that word there is a point-of-view problem." "I can't believe I let anyone see this dreck." You know how it goes.

But since the draft is done and it has been emailed out, I get to indulge these feelings. They're negative, sure, but they wash through and over and away. Meanwhile, just relaxing and letting my guard down against those feelings, which I couldn't do before if I wanted to ever finish writing the story, is a relief. Why? Well. There's a character in a book I love who discovers that her magical talent is to suppress magic in her immediate environs; when she arrives in a place with no magic at all, it's like this huge weight lifts off her shoulders. She hadn't realized how draining this involuntary function was until it was able to just stop. It's kind of like that. Negative feelings suck, but constantly patrolling the mental walls against them is exhausting. Until Wednesday, when it's time to listen to what everyone thinks of the story, I get to rest those defense mechanisms.

Which is about all the insight I've got to share this morning. So. Bonus links!

Why my blog
has no comments function

Summary: Because it's hard work. I know my limits, sometimes.

Big news: "The Day the Sidewalks Melted" is now live for you to read in Ideomancer volume 9, issue 1. Read it here. And since it won't take you all that much time to read, go read the rest of the free, online magazine while you're at it. The other stories are breathtaking, the poetry likewise, and the reviews illuminating.

And consider donating, since that's how the staff of Ideomancer keep the magazine going and the contributors paid year after year.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a new story, which is news and really oughtn't to be. That is, I ought to be doing it often enough--writing new stories--that it's not newsworthy. But I finally realized, considering the woefully slow progress I've been making on finishing the NaNoWriMo 2009 draft of Melissa's Ghost (I'm afraid John's getting the proof copy for an anniversary present; it wasn't done in time for his birthday), that putting off everything else until I'm done with that job is a recipe for unhappiness.

Recipe for happiness:

• One story idea that won't let you go.
• A portable Smith-Corona that's gathering dust.
• Five minutes reviewing the typewriter's instruction manual.
• About two and a half hours.

It's not actually a new story, but it's such a revision over the first time it showed up that it might as well be. What's it about? Well, in one sense, it's about succubi and how they reproduce. In another, it's about lives of ennui, lives of substance, and profound transformation. It's probably only going to be about 1500 words by the end of the day.

The end of the day will not be later than this weekend. I have promised it to the twice-monthly critique group. No, not the original typewritten draft. It'll get retyped into WordPerfect and revised first. Then emailed.

See, I'm not entirely a luddite here. (I mean, look! Blog post! On the internet!) It's just that sometimes, to recover from a stall, I have to switch from my daily laptop to something a little more "me plus words minus everything else". Sometimes I need to dust off the Ancient Decrepit DOS 6.2 Compaq, hide away from the wifi and from all my fancy editing tools. And sometimes I need to escape the bureaucracy of file names and directory trees and run away to where the paper shows up before the words rather than after, to where each letter has weight and the price of going too fast is a key-jam or the whiteout ribbon.

And sometimes I just need that immediate reward of a bell going "ding!" every time I invent a new ten-word sequence or so. "Go you! Now come up with another ten. Good job! Again!"

Seriously. You should try it. It's refreshing.

It's amazing how "Just another half hour" turns into a day with absolutely no nutritional value.

Seriously. I know exactly where today went wrong. I can put my finger right on it. It was the bit where John left for work and I said, "I've set my alarm for 9. I'll get up then." And I went back to sleep. Somehow the alarm at 9 turned into another at 9:45 and another at 10:30, and lunch spent with a book* turned into going back to bed with the book and pretty much being worthless until I was done rereading the book and it was time to feed the cats.

I'm not sure if it's a symptom of pathological apathy or of a latent tendency toward the nocturnal. Probably somewhere in between. I know that if I sleep late I'm likely never to get anything of use done, and that I have my most productive days when I get up early and get right to work.

With enough willpower I can repair a late-start day, but it's not pleasant. Since I treated yesterday like the weekend day that it was, enjoying a Rock Band lunch with John and a Dominion dinner date with friends and an afternoon in between full of naps-with-book, I felt obliged to repair today. And it wasn't pleasant, because it involved turning down a friend's invite to hang out and chat and possibly play video games. But I did get today's quota of articles written, and while I didn't quite work on the novel, I thought about the novel.

Tomorrow will be better.

*Book: Sunshine, Robin McKinley. Predates Twilight and presents a more grown-up view than Meyer's book does of Life With Vampire. Doesn't jettison main character's mundane life as unimportant, for instance. Does spend a little too much time in the main character's head, though, to the point of interrupting dialogue every two sentences with a page or two of internal monologue; but still, Rae Seddon is no Bella Swan.

The original mission statement with this blog was, "I will blog every day, and only after I've written that day." And of course I began to fail at that standard pretty much the moment I put it into place. But it's never too late to get back on board with a good idea. It's my reusable New Year's Resolution: This year I'll write more, with more self-discipline and better time-management! This will be the year I Act Like A Writer!

The problem with New Year's Resolutions, though, is the high expectations involved. It isn't enough to say, "Tomorrow I'll write more than I did today." Oh no. We have to put it in terms of a whole year. So the moment we drop down out of the stratospheric levels of Perfect, well, that's the year down the tubes. It doesn't help that we ante up an amount of self-esteem proportional to the impossibility of the perfection we seek.

Some people, recognizing this, turn the idea of New Year's Resolutions into a joke. They set deliberately impossible goals, or deliberately trivial ones, and they laugh about them. Laughing is good for you. Jokes are healthy. But I don't want to turn the idea of self-improvement itself into a joke. I seriously want to take all that magical, psychological power bound up in our communal awe for the event of the annual odometer ticking over, and push it into my personal engines. Vroom!

So. A do-able New Year's Resolution with a reasonable attitude toward success and failure.

Here's another tank of gas for that: John and I just purchased health insurance. He got a new job, and, since it's an hourly contract position, he didn't get a new company-paid health insurance policy with it. Well, they offered him one, but the options offered cost about the same but provided less coverage than what we were contemplating purchasing on our own. (His new employers did, however, offer him a dental policy worth the premium. I will never understand this system.)

What does health insurance have to do with my writing goals for the year? Well, it has to do with how we signed up. Since we had the option, we made me the primary insured. I'm the one with more time on my hands, after all, or, if not, if I actually am spending all the time writing I should and the rest of my work week being a housewife, at least I'm the one with a more flexible work schedule. I can bike down to the State Farm office on Mapleton just about any day, weather permitting, and sign stuff. Or make phone calls. Or whatever. Not that it this hasn't been the case since I quit my day job in April 2004, but I since I haven't been the insured employee, I haven't typically been authorized to handle the bureaucratic details. Insurance companies want the signature of the guy in the number one slot. They don't want to talk to the dependent or beneficiary.

(Speaking of companies that won't talk to the beneficiary, let us another day discuss companies who, when receiving an application from a married couple with a hyphenated last name, "helpfully" "correct" the husband's last name by removing the hyphened-on half, and then require the husband to call them and then fill out a change-of-name form rather than just saying "Sorry, we goofed" when the wife calls to point out the error. Shall we? It would be a blast.)

When you're the primary insured on the application, the application wants to know all about you. Including your employment status. I always fill out "Self-employed" not just because that's what writers are, even if they aren't making a lot of sales, but because it's an act of magic. Or psychology, take your pick. I am not unemployed and dabbling at a hobby. My writing is my job. I mean to treat it like a job, and I expect others to respect that it is my job, and I'm not going to wait until I've sold a novel to say so. "Self-employed." Emphatically.

And then when they ask "Part time or full?" a little sliver of conscience grimaces and admits I don't spend 40 hours a week on my writing like I think I should. "Part-time." Sheepishly.

Entering "self-employed" and "part-time" caused a new section of form to unfold on the web page (yay, Javascript!), "Determination of Self-Employed Business Group of One," asking me to check yes to four more questions. Among them: have I been doing it for at least a year? Do I have taxable gross income from my self-employment from which I have derived a substantial part of my income, defined as sufficient to pay the annual insurance premium, at least one year in three? And do I work a minimum of 24 hours a week?

This is Magic 101. Mundane action, or "sweat," is a necessary component of any spell. It's very important to say "Writing is my job! I am self-employed!" It is also very important to then write like it's my job. The Goddess is very prompt at reminding me of this, and very versatile in how She delivers the message. This day, She was sending the message via Assurant Health and Time Insurance Company.

Well. I wasn't exactly going to sit there with a calculator and go, "I think last week I only worked 15 hours, and the last time I had gross income sufficient to pay this policy was three years ago." I said yes, and yes, and yes, and yes, and I signed on the dotted line.

And that's where the New Year's Resolution juice comes from. There's nothing quite like being unsure whether I've told the truth to inspire me to make it the truth.

So. My resolution, in precise: Write 5 hours each day, 5 days a week. This should consist of at least two articles for Demand Studios, any assigned blogging, and constant work on completing and submitting fiction submissions.

And blogging here when I'm done.

...And also flossing my teeth every morning, and achieving World Peace by December. [laugh track] No, no, but seriously, folks...

Happy Two Thousand And Ten!

It occurs to me that I forgot to blog for the entire latter three-fourths of November. You may have been under the impression that NaNoWriMo kicked me under a bus and left me for dead. If so, you would be wrong. Not far wrong, but wrong nonetheless. The bus analogy is just a bit too much. If you want accuracy, we could say that NaNoWriMo sort of prodded my backside while I was looking at something else, with the result that I sort of stumbled out in front of a moped puttering along at about 3 miles an hour, with the result that, to prevent my picking up moped tracks on the back of my favorite jacket, I had to keep running at a slow, steady, but unwavering pace for the entirety of November.

Which didn't leave me a lot of time for blogging, this year. That'll teach me not to watch my back.

In any case, the story's about the same as last year: Crossed the 50K line (see attached 2009 Winner Badge), failed to reach The End. Also, only managed to do about 9 of the hoped-for 30 Demand Studios articles; nevertheless, this total surpassed the totals of each previous month. So. Progress!

Going forward...

I have pledged to the other inhabitants of the "Life After NaNoWriMo" forum that I will finish this novel! I will finish this first draft in time to use my "free proof copy" code from CreateSpace (expires July 1). And, personally, I hope to finish it much sooner than that. Like, in time to give my wonderful, supportive husband a birthday present. "Limited edition," I told him. "Very limited. Like, just one copy. Signed and numbered and everything." This amused him.

As for my "day job," Demand Studios is doing something very special this month: Write For a Cause with Demand Studios. (Link goes to Facebook, where you can "become a fan" or just follow the cause's progress through the month.) For every eight articles their writers complete and their editors approve, they will donate a book to a child in need, via First Book. If you've been considering writing for Demand Studios, now's a darn good time. And this month's also a darn good time for me to finally reach a more respectable "day job" level of output with them.

And that's the news for now. Summary: Not dead, not under a bus, have won NaNoWriMo, will continue on.