author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A thing I did not do today: Bake the fruitcake. I will have to bake it tomorrow afternoon.

Which is to say: there will not be an all-night Winter Solstice open house and vigil at Chez LeBoeuf-Little this year, because reasons, but there will be a fruitcake. And I was going to bake it today. This afternoon! Only by the time I really got going this morning it was too late to start, what with having to leave for scrimmage by 5:30 PM and all.

Then I thought, "OK, fine, I'll do it when I come home from scrimmage." Then I went to scrimmage. Then I came home, thoroughly exhausted and covered in bruises and scrapes, and I said, "You know what? Never mind. I'm heading for the tub and then to bed." (No one should be surprised by this. I honestly don't know why I keep getting surprised by this. Things planned for after derby don't happen, it's a reliable fact, and yet I'm still in denial about it.)

Look, this is a cake that takes three and a half hours to bake, and then a half hour after it comes out the oven I have to be on hand to take it out of its pan. Also the preparing of the tube pan and the mixing of the batter takes a good half hour at least. Really, I should have started the moment I woke up, just to be on the safe side.

But I didn't start the fruitcake first thing when I woke up. Instead...

A thing I did do today: WRITE. Damn straight. Not a lot, not as much as I would like, certainly not as much as I should given that I've got a Fictionette release due tomorrow, but more than I've done in a day since I got sick. With an earlier start to the day, too. Yeah, I'm happy about that. Damn straight.

Also my sore throat is gone. Was it the pork rinds, or was it coincidence? We'll find out next time I yield to temptation and buy pork rinds again. Which I will, because I have no self-control.

PS. I am married to the sweetest human being. I walked in the door and he said, "Dinner's on the counter for you. Nothing big, I just reordered what you got from Golden Sun last time." That is quite possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to me on my arrival home from roller derby activity.

So hey, I'm back. Why so long? Well. Remember how I said I got sick? And remember how I said, "at least I'm on the mend"? Yeah, no. Possibly I was fooled by that brief feeling of well-being that comes with a really effective dose of pseudoephedrine. In actuality, I wasn't just sick but SICK. Like, the kind of sick that consists of maybe two, three days of pitched battle between the viral infection and the immune system... and two to three weeks of healing the damage this did to the respiratory system and sinuses. I'm now in my third week of having returned to a normal level of physical activity and I still come home from roller derby practice with my throat raw from all the unreasonable requirements I'm putting on it. You know, that air goes out and air comes in at a moderately accelerated rate? Yeah.

And before you ask, yes I got my flu shot. Back in October. I believe in herd immunity! For all I know, this actually was the reduced-severity version of the flu one might get after a vaccine. Or maybe it was just a really, really nasty cold. I don't know. It was awful, is what it was, and I pretty much ditched any pretense at attempting to continue my NaNo Rebel Self-Challenge.

And you know what happens when, after two weeks of effort fomenting new work-a-day habits, you suddenly just stop? It's like those two weeks never happened. Supposedly I'm all better now, but I'm having the hardest damn time getting more than minimal work in every day. I suck.

But this is a new week and I am blogging again so some good things are possible! Also my excuse for not getting much work done today is this: I COOKED A LOT. Am cooking. I am cooking a lot, and also, depending on your point of view, adventurously.

It started like this: While I was in New Orleans, Dad's lady-friend brought us some head cheese, or "brawn" as they call it on the east side of the big puddle, from a favorite butcher on the road from Baton Rouge somewhere. (I didn't get the details.) And, wow, hot damn, had I forgotten how much I liked head cheese. I was introduced to it as a youngster, and already my tastes were proving to be preternaturally Cajun, in the sense of the Justin Wilson "They'll eat anything" punchline. I adored it. I adored it this time around, too. We devoured cold slices on crackers. It was amazing.

So a few days later I arrived back in Boulder, too sick to think about anything other than how awful being sick was. Took a while for my appetite to return. Once it did, I spent a few days just cycling through my habitual sickbed comfort foods. But once I was done with that, wow was I craving cold slices of head cheese on crackers. But I didn't know where to find it. It's a bit outside the usual run of deli meats, and presumably less popular in the Rocky Mountain Region than in the Cajun South.

So after some hesitant inquiries at the Pearl Street Whole Foods, where the question was met with blank stares and "what's that?" I did some research online and came up with a short list of places in Boulder County to rule out before making the trek down to some definite sources in Denver.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped in at the first on my list, Blackbelly Market. They were the closest to home. Also their website mentions utilizing the whole animal, a hopeful sign if one is looking for an offal product. And, as it turns out, they do make head cheese! Just not right now. But they invited me to call after the new year and ask them to set some aside for me. Mission accomplished!

Still, now I was curious about the second location on my list: "Longmont Packing #1," a butcher shop fairly convenient to an appointment I had that evening. I resolved to visit. Turns out, it's the carnicería right next door to Guacamole's (where I satisfied a craving for menudo that sad Saturday morning when I discovered that the Sancho's location in the north Boulder DMV mall had closed). Head cheese not being a particularly Latino offal meat product, I didn't think I'd find any there. (Note: Apparently I'm wrong about it that; Wikipedia says it's very popular in Latin America.) But I might as well go in and see what else I might find, right?

But here's the thing. It's stupid. I'm embarrassed about this. But when it comes to those places that primarily serve the area's Latino community, I'm, well, shy. I get self-conscious. I know I look like someone who couldn't possibly know her way around the aisles, someone who might ask stupid questions or say stupid things, someone who will almost certainly necessitate an English-speaking staff member at every transaction. And, OK, yes I'm semi-fluent in Spanish, but--and this is the really stupid thing--I'm generally too embarrassed to even try. I get anxious about screwing up in laughable or even offensive ways, or just coming across as a self-congratulatory show-off.

Look, I told you it was stupid. Nevertheless, there it is.

So I went in! Yay! And then spent a couple minutes wandering the aisles just psyching myself up to interact with anyone. I stared with great concentration at the various canned chilis as though seriously considering the comparative merits of various brand names. I might have kept this foolishness up for quite some time had I not worked my way over to the produce aisle and discovered that they had mirlitons! OK, chayotes. Same thing. Right there and then, visions of The Holiday Casserole of My People gave me the drive to get over myself already and head over to the meat counter in search of shrimp and actually ask, in Spanish, about the available varieties. Did they have the really tiny ones? No? Just the ones on display here? OK. No, no thank you. But one lengua de res, por favor. Because I saw those on display just a few feet to the left of los camarones, and it got me remembering fondly a beef tongue stew I wanted to try making again.

Anyway, I'm kind of proud of myself now. Not for successfully posing as bilingual for whole five minutes--it is not a particularly unique skill and I'm only so-so at it--but, I mean, for shoving my self-consciousness and anxiety to the side and managing to function in spite of them.

Long story short, that is how I came to have a soupy version of this Basque-style beef tongue stew waiting for me in the slow cooker after roller derby practice. And it was amazing. As amazing as Cajun head cheese on crackers? Unclear. I'll have to get back to you after side-by-side comparison.

And what of the mirlitons? That will be a story for tomorrow.

Welp, I did it. I broke my streak. I found an excuse that would not be denied, and that excuse was, "I'm tired." I'd been going non-stop since getting off the train Thursday. I got maybe three hours sleep Sunday night, not getting in from the various downtown afterparty activities until about 3:30 AM and then having to get up for some scheduled errands at 6:30. (I tried to go back to sleep after those errands, but, in a stunning reversal of roles, Dad woke me up playing his music too loud.) What I really needed was a whole 'nother weekend to rest from my weekend. I couldn't have that, so I took Monday off instead.

That's the NaNoWriMo Rebel Report for Monday the 12th: Nada, zip, zilch, and NO REGRETS. As for the weekend, I was very dutiful. I did my freewriting session and a bit of work toward Friday's fictionette every day. Got the work in Saturday morning before going to the tournament venue, and then did it Sunday evening at the Cafe Envie in the French Quarter (the one at Decatur and Barracks) when I ran out of personal partying capacity and was ready for some quiet me-and-a-laptop time.

...I suppose I should set down some thoughts here about the tournament. It was... a lot of derby. It was very exciting. I have thoughts, but I haven't sorted through them just yet, so. Maybe tomorrow?

Anyway, there you go. Out of the first 12 days of November, eleven had a perfect record and the twelfth was a rest day. It's the thirteenth now and I'm getting back to it. I'm also getting on the train out of town, so we're back to prioritizing the internetty stuff for when wifi is available and saving the offline-capable stuff for when I'm rolling. Thus, an early blog post. I'll also do a bit of puttering around my manuscript database before I go, see if there's any responses to outstanding submissions, maybe figure out what story to send where next.

Oh hey yeah, and I've also done my Morning Pages for the day. No particular psychological insights there or anything. Just listed out the stuff I'd have to do to get ready to leave, and then babbled about how stressed out I was about getting it all done in four hours. Travel prep stress! It gets me coming and going.

Anyway, that's all I've got. See y'all tomorrow morning at Chicago Union Station.

This will be even briefer. It's going to be as "in with a technicality" as it gets. Today started at 6:30 AM and it's not quite over at midnight-thirty. I've driven to and fro across town several times and I've watched... four games? four games of roller derby, as a very engaged and active spectator. I have attended one afterparty with a lot of dancing and crowds and such. There was also a sort of "pre-afterparty" to pass the time until the afterparty venue was ready for us. It's been an even longer day. And now here I am.

The tl;dr version of the NaNoWriMo Rebel Report goes like this: I did most of the things before we left the house. I am doing the rest of the things now. The 100% streak will be maintained. And the Friday Fictionette for November 9 was released on time; it's called "Your Turn" (ebook, audiobook) and it involves an impossible Scrabble opponent.

That's the news and I am outta here.

This will be brief. If it weren't NaNoWriMo and I hadn't challenged myself with doing all my writing tasks every day, no excuses, this blog post would not be. My excuse would be a damn good one. It would be, "Have you seen the day I had?" But it is NaNoWriMo, and I have set myself a challenge, and even good excuses violate the rule of NO EXCUSES, so. Despite how nonstop my day has been since arriving in New Orleans--pretty much straight from the train station to the French Quarter, at which point the skates went on and stayed on until about ten o'clock tonight--I am blogging. You're welcome.

Let's head straight into the day's NaNoWriMo Rebel Report so I can get this done and go to sleep.

Morning Pages: Funny how I got to them late yesterday because I slept badly and didn't want to get up, and today I got to them late because I slept so well I didn't want to get up. Either I don't get enough sleep so I want more, or I get plenty sleep and it feels so good I don't want it to stop. But I got 'em done. Set up in the lounge car at a cafe table again and pretty much camped out there until the train left the Hammond, LA station. I no longer have any memory of what I wrote, but it obviously did the job, because the rest of my writing time on the train was enjoyable and productive. Yay!

Freewriting: My prompt was the phrase "Don't miss the train," to be considered both literally and figuratively. Additionally, describe how you hope an upcoming event will go, but from the point of view of a future you, years later, telling the story of that event to your (or someone else's) grandkids.

Friday Fictionette: Hot damn. Got it done. The last three days have been nothing but babble draft and babble notes, but today I got the story and the author's note done.

Short Story: Have I mentioned the day I've had? Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to reread my notes. Then I'm going to jot down another couple notes. Then I'm going to sleep. "If you can't do a lot, do a little--but do something." So I shall.

(Yesterday's session on the train was a bunch of notes about structure. Trying to figure out if I can keep it mainly to the single scene from the original flash, but use bits of that scene as jumping off points for flashbacks. Looks like yes, maybe.)

Submission Procedures: This is another one filed under "I'm tired, how little can I get away with?" It's going to be administrative email rounds again. What does that mean, you ask? Well, tonight it means, check email for responses to outstanding submissions, and continue correspondence with editor concerning latest publication. That's about all I've got the wherewithal for. If I tried to send a submission tonight I'd probably flub it something dire. I'm that done in.

(This is pretty much all I did at the train station last night. We were late into the station, I didn't have a lot of time, and rush jobs are as susceptible as overtired jobs to dire flubbing.)

Blogging: Well, I've done that.

So I continue at 100%, even if it feels like I'm getting by on technicalities.

Tomorrow: Day 1 of WFTDA champs! Will get some of my work done before heading to the venue in time to watch probably Game 2. Will hopefully get the rest of my work done after I get back home. Look for a late night blog post again.

Over.

Ahoy. This blog post comes to you live from Loaded Joe's in Avon, where Friday Nights mean Karaoke with Sandman. I brought the tail end of my work day here--ok, well, I admit it, I brought most of my work day here. At least half. Which means typing and singing along at the same time even more than usual. Which means that, now and again, I'll end up typing the lyrics of whatever song is being performed, and I'll have to go back and figure out where I really left off. MULTITASKING! Yes.

[Author's turn to sing! Author couldn't decide, so she went with that old standby, "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. The crowd is very supportive tonight. It always is, though. Love this place.]

I've been in Avon, Colorado since Sunday afternoon, on my annual "aaaauuugh finally it's off-season I'M RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME" week. I've spent it mostly quietly, walking around town, hanging out in the library, watching the Saints game at Loaded Joe's, dropping in with the 10th Mountain Roller Dolls for a practice, writing, avoiding writing, excoriating myself for avoiding writing, finally getting back to the writing... kind of the same as at home, really, only ALL BY MYSELF and not in my own house where I can suddenly discover the need to do the dishes and the laundry.

OK, well, there are dishes and laundry in a resort-style hotel, yes. BUT NOT AS MANY.

I'm done with moths, by the way! Did I say? Yeah. I put forth a heroic effort on the night before I drove out of town, emptying the closet to the bare walls, cycling batches of clothes through a 170-degree oven for 50 minutes at a time, wiping things down with diluted vinegar--you know the drill--and I didn't get to sleep until three. BUT NOW I AM DONE. The last stronghold of the months has been CLEANED OUT. OK, well, it's possible that there a few hanging on in the office and some desultory preventative cleaning may be advised. But the confirmed active infestations are done.

[Author pauses while a duet gets up to sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and the entire establishment joins in, anthem-style.]

That's the sense of accomplishment and completion I drove away from Boulder with. And here I am. And now it's time for the Day 2 of the NaNoWriMo Rebel Report.

Morning Pages: More or less on time. A much better morning--one hundred percent percent less headache, for one thing--but took it slow. I am on vacation, dammit! Most of the first of the three pages was just writing down what I dreamt. I have trouble sleeping through the night these days, so it's always a good sign when I wake up with a bunch of dreams to write down. Foremost among the dream imagery was a bull nosing up to the front door of a suburban house, and me thinking, "That's weird, usually it's deer."

[Author pauses to appreciate the host and his partner in crime dueting on "Home" by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. With customized lyrics.]

Freewriting: Got that just now here at Loaded Joe's. Came up with an idea for a whole damn novel. That happens a lot, actually. It doesn't exactly make me happy. I always get this sense of despair like, I will never live long enough to make novels out of all these ideas. I suppose that's the wrong attitude. I should be thinking, "I will never run out of ideas as long as I live." But what I'm really thinking is, I will never run out of homework. Well, that's what you sign up for when you decide to be a writer, Niki. Deal with it.

The prompt was from the weekly Reedsy newsletter. I wholeheartedly recommend this newsletter. They give you five prompts every Friday and challenge you to submit a story based on one of those prompts to their weekly contest. Deadline is always midnight Eastern of the following Friday.

The Friday Fictionettes Project: Woo-cha! Got it in one. One DAY. I would like not to have to do that again, but: the Friday Fictionette for November 2 is up, and it's called "The Chance of a Lifetime." It's about the drawbacks of immortality and what might be done about 'em. Patrons pledging $1/month may download the ebook, and Patrons pledging $3/month may additionally access the audiobook. Everyone else, just wait up and the freebie for the month will be released when November's over.

Real Fiction Stuff for Real Money (I Hope): So, last night, I brushed the dust off a short-short I'd written for a Codex contest early this year and gave it a read-through. Wound up making like a hundred words or so of notes on the sucker and getting excited about it all over again. I'll hit it again for about five minutes before bed tonight.

Submission Procedures: Soon as I'm done with this blog post I'm going to figure out where to send "Survival, After" next. I may have mentioned this before, but it, too, started as a flash piece for that same contest. What am I thinking--of course I mentioned it before. I remember whining endlessly in this here blog about how the revision kept getting longer and longer and OH MY GODS WILL THIS NEVER BE FINISHED? Well. It did, and it's heading out again tonight. Or at least I'll figure out tonight where to send it, and send it on Monday. Look, it's late, OK? I'm three beers in.

Blogging: Et voila.

[Author's runs away to sing "Here I Go Again" in front of a very drunk and supportive crowd. Love y'all bunches!]

It's November 1! Everyone around these here bloggish parts knows what that means, right? Pardon me while I commit derivative doggerel:

Remember, remember, the first of November:
Character, story and plot;
It's now Wrimo season, so now there's no reason
to put off that novel you've got.

Only, I am not noveling this year. That's OK. I don't always. But I do always observe NaNoWriMo in some way. (This is what they call being a NaNoWriMo "rebel.") When the whole internet explodes in word sprints, word wars, writing prompts, and mutual encouragement, it's a great time to set myself some writing challenge or other, and that's what I'm doing this year.

My challenge to myself is this: 30 days of accomplishing every writing task on my daily list.

It's the same list I've been trying to accomplish for, well, years, I guess. Every day, let there be a session each of freewriting and Friday Fictionette progress. Every weekday, let there also be progress on some commercial fiction project (usually a short story) and the usual manuscript submission procedures, and let there also be a blog post. Like this one. Hi! And let every weekday begin with Morning Pages, because that's how I give my brain a daily tune-up.

Only, now that it's NaNoWriMo, let there also be no excuses. No missed tasks! No more "drat, I didn't get it done before derby" or "blast, I only have 15 minutes." As I keep telling myself, if I can't do a lot, I'll do a little; it's better than doing nothing at all.

This blog began as a way of tracking my progress through what was probably my second NaNoWriMo ever. After NaNoWriMo was over that year, I used it to track my writing progress in general. I blogged to report that, yes, I had showed up on the page today, too. Sort of an accountability thing. Regardless of whether anyone was reading. It was like Natalie Goldberg's trick of calling a friend's answering machine and leaving a message saying "I'll be at the cafe at 5:00 PM tomorrow to get some writing done. Join me if you like, but don't tell me whether you're coming. See you there, or not!" Having left that message, well, now she had to show up, didn't she? Same thing here: Someone could be reading, so I'd better uphold the commitment.

But of course I've drifted away from that focus over the years. I also blog about non-writing things, like roller derby and addictive clicky games. Or I'll go for weeks without blogging, even though I've been writing, because I just keep running all out of evens by Blog O'Clock. Alas.

This month I intend to blog every weekday, because it's one of my writing tasks, and doing all my writing tasks every day is what I'm challenging myself to do this November. And I'm going to focus on reporting to y'all (accountability!) my successes and failures at this challenge.

Accordingly:

Morning Pages: As soon as I was functional this morning. This wasn't immediate; I had an awful headache starting at about 4 AM--a rare thing these days, thank goodness--that made it hard to get moving after the alarm clock went off. Some days, just getting up and putting pen to paper is a righteous accomplishment.

Freewriting: Kept it short, because I had a lot of other things to do. About 10 minutes and 600 words. Writing prompt courtesy of the Writer Igniter.

Friday Fictionette Project: Finally pushed the one due last week out the door. Made it the Fictionette Freebie for October: "Living Undercover," in which we wonder if the sacrifices have all been worth it. Then started babbling out a draft for tomorrow's release. I've been suffering from a chronic Perfectionism Infection where these are concerned; it makes me take longer drafting the suckers, but at the same time, because the pressure of Must Get This Right heightens the avoidance factor, it makes it harder for me to force myself to sit down and do them. I'm going to try to--this sounds awful, but I hope you know what I mean--care less about quality. These are meant to offer readers a glimpse into my writing process while holding me to the challenge of producing a flash-length story-like object on a recurring deadline. They are not meant to be perfect. I have to remember that.

Submission Procedures: I never did report, did I, that my story came home from its "second date" knowing that there would not be a third? Alas. The Editors-in-Chief decided to pass on it. I still need to log that R in my database and figure out where to send that sucker next. I haven't done this yet, I wanted to get this blog post out while it was still November 1, and it's quite late tonight. So, under the rubric of "Do a little if you can't do a lot," I'm just going to log the rejection and leave resubbing the story for another day.

Commercial Fiction: By the same token, I haven't left myself a lot of time for this; I'll pick a story that needs revising, read it over, and jot a couple notes down.

Blogging: Why, so I have!

That's the Day 1 report--see you tomorrow. Happy NaNoWriMo, one and all!

Oh hi there. So. Life has been a lot lately; hence the radio silence. Roller derby has been a lot of that lot. There was the North America West Continental Cup, as you know. Then there was our annual B-52 B-team tournament, officially branded this year as part of #ThinAirThrowdown and co-hosted with Denver Roller Derby. And then, when there should have been a week of rest and healing, roller derby suddenly became a painful place full of emotional turmoil. Things are not yet resolved, but I know that this too shall pass. In any case, I'm going to my first practice of the off-season tonight. Life's too short not to do what I love, and I love skating. And I love the people I get to skate with--that is unlikely to change.

But, all in all, roller derby has made it hard to buckle down to the writing day. So I have got a lot of writing to catch up on.

I am so very much behind on the Friday Fictionettes project. I only just pushed the September 14th offering last night ("The Poisoned Chalice," ebook, audiobook). And still I'm as much behind on the Fictionette Artifacts as I ever was. So. This week I have set myself the 100% Unreasonable Goal of releasing the fictionettes for September 21 and 28, pushing the August Fictionette Freebie to Wattpad and 4theWords, and getting caught up on the Artifacts, all by the end of the month.

My More Or Less Realistic Goal is exactly the same, just minus the Artifacts.

It's not so bad. I'm off to a good start already. This morning I went from blank page to full-length first draft on the fictionette for September 21. I might manage to get it out the door tomorrow. Then, if I can just do that two-day process all over again Thursday and Friday, the September 28 fictionette will go out on time. Follow it up with a weekend full of typing to see all overdue Artifacts in the mail Monday morning. It can be done!

If nothing else, a good percentage of it will get done, and I'll start October in a better place.

Back on the subject of roller derby... like I said, last week was rough. But on Sunday I got a couple reminders that, in the wider world, there is community and support and goodwill, and that there's still room for joy in the part of my brain where the skates are kept.

One of those reminders came as a more or less expected part of our afternoon plans. John and I took our laptops over to Vapor Distillery for a few hours of cocktails and writing (he's got his own heap of overdue writing project to contend with), and that's always a good time. Vapor Distillery makes very fine liquor. They mix an exceedingly tasty cocktail. And they're one of BCB's sponsors, so they are very generous to league members. Their generosity doesn't come in the form of a particular percentage discount. It's more sort of down to whatever the bartender feels like that day. Sometimes it's a couple bucks off the tab, or one of the afternoon's drinks free, or "hey, want to try our specialty shot? I'll do you one on the house, see how you like it." Sometimes it's more. On one memorable occasion, it was "put that back in your wallet, we've got you tonight. Yes, all of it. We're your sponsor and we love you and we're heartbroken that your practice space burned down."

Sunday's session, if I may be vague, fell somewhere in between the extremes. We were there some five hours and we drank rather a lot. We ordered Chinese food delivery so we could stay and work and drink some more. Meanwhile, the staff kibitzed with us about the football games they were watching and invited us to share their chips and dip. It was cozy. It felt like a form of self-care.

The other positive derby-related thing was completely out of the blue. That morning we went out to brunch, me and John and a friend. When the food arrived, the server said, "Your bill is taken care of, by the way, compliments of a fan of Fleur de Beast." My jaw dropped. "Seriously? Um... do I get to meet this fan and tell them thank you? Or are they a secret fan?" The server said he'd find out. As it happened, the mystery fan was shy and declined closer interaction, but they reiterated their compliments. I could only ask the server to pass along my gratitude.

And that was the occurrence that inspired this tweet, in case you saw it and were wondering.

It's been almost a week since I've said hi. Hi, blog! Stuff has been happening.

I came home from Omaha on Monday! I got sick! Now I'm getting better! I had a massage and a day off from practice on Tuesday, then I had classic sinusy crap on Wednesday, and then by Thursday I was feeling better enough to go to scrimmage.

That may not have been smart. I got more worn out and beat up than at either of our Continental Cup games! It being my first time back on the track in the Mile High area after spending a weekend playing derby at an elevation of only 1,090 feet might be a factor. Being sick, yeah, that was a factor too. Also relevant: we only had five skaters per bench. We played four-on-four so that everyone could get a chance to sit one jam in five, and everyone was in the jammer rotation. (You know what's fun? And by "fun" I mean "hell"? TWO-MINUTE JAMS. It is not always good news when the other jammer gets a penalty. Sometimes it just means now NOBODY has lead jammer status, and life for the next minute and a half will suuuuuuuuuck.) Then, at halftime, someone on one team had to leave. One of our skaters who had NSO'd the first half geared up to replace them. For reasons that were never entirely explained, the replacement skater was assigned to the other bench, so the second period of play featured a team of four versus a team of six. GUESS WHICH TEAM I WAS ON. Deathmarch scrim FTW! Did I mention that everybody jammed? And now nobody gets to sit out any? Woo. We got extra-long line-up time between jams, probably 45 seconds or a minute instead of the usual 30 seconds; it was just enough time for me to get just enough wind back to be able to swallow a small sip of water and then rush back out to the track.

In other derby news, archival footage is up from our games in Omaha! Here's Friday's game; here's Saturday. Archives are always free to watch. Have fun!

In still more derby news, my season would appear not to be over! I will be skating with the Bombshells in the B-team tournament bracket at the Thin Air Throwdown, which we are co-hosting at the Boulder County Fairgrounds on September 14-16. Tickets are available, and I recommend you get right on that, because in addition to the B-team tournament, there will be a round-robin exhibition of three of the highest ranked teams in the world. How often do you get to see Rose versus VRDL without leaving the state, let alone the county? So. MAKE PLANS.

Also I wrote! And finished stuff! And submitted stuff too! It's been a good week.

On Wedensday, I finally put up the Friday Fictionette for August 24. It's called "Change'll Do You Good." What kind of change? Any kind you like. Change of scenery. Change of career. Change in your social circle. Shape-changing, too, let's not forget that one. Anyway, it's about 1300 words long and available to subscribers in ebook and audio formats on Patreon.

Then I had to hurry up (as much as I could while subsisting on pseudoephedrine, Mucinex, and tea) and revise some older fictionettes for reprint submission for a deadline of TODAY. (I mean "today" as in August 31. I am aware it is has not been August 31 for a couple hours now. Shh.) I put them into the email about two hours ago and am feeling very proud of myself now. I'm actually quite pleased with how they turned out. Should they come home from today's excursions with rejections, I think they're worth the "til Hell won't have 'em" treatment. (When I finished my week at Viable Paradise in 2006, I swore the VP Graduate's Oath, which is to write, to finish what I write, to submit what I write, to paying markets, until Hell won't have 'em.) There aren't that many places that I know of that A. take reprints B. at flash length, and C. don't mind if their only previous appearance was on Patreon or by other self-publishing means, but I intend to find them all.

What with the traveling and the sick and the playing catch-up and the other, more implacable deadlines, I have not yet released the Fictionette Freebie for August. I intend to do that this weekend. I haven't selected one yet, but it probably won't be "Change'll Do You Good." Because it's only been out a few days, that's why. It would feel silly to have published it only Wednesday and then suddenly revisit it to change its "Who Can See This Post" option. Might as well have just pushed it up full public in the first place.

Look, I don't claim to make logical sense here. I'm not sure I even claim to make sense, period. But this is the sense of it I've got and I'm sticking with it until further notice.

Also scheduled for this weekend: More anti-moth activities. Yay? I finished putting the portion of the office I'd last cleaned back together last week Wednesday--which involved, you might remember, vacuuming every single book and vinegar-rinsing every single item that wasn't made out of paper--just in time to leave for Omaha. My next step will be the brick-and-board bookshelf in the bedroom, which I am now 98% sure houses its own infestation. We've been keeping doors closed so the moths don't migrate, and the bedroom's almost the only place I've seen moths all week. ALMOST. One crossed my path in the office the other day and I just about wept. I'm hoping it stumbled in after taking a tour of the house during a time when the bedroom door was left open. BUT WE'LL SEE.

Wow, that was a long post. Maybe my posts wouldn't be so stupidly long if I blogged more than once a week. More research on the subject is needed.

Hey hey! We won today! Boulder County: 260; Pikes Peak: 167. Our goal was 1. to win, and 2. by a bigger margin than last time we played them, and, hot damn, that's what we did. Good job, BCB! Live Bold, Bleed Gold!

I'm told we looked a lot more together, cohesive, calm, and strong today, but I suspect a lot of that has to do with the difference between playing a team ranked above you and playing a team ranked below. I know I've seen footage of future opponents getting crushed by highly ranked teams and thought, "Oh, look at those weaknesses we can exploit," only to discover those weaknesses not to be in evidence when we met those opponents on the track. Or, rather, our team was less able to create and exploit weaknesses in those opponents than were the teams in the footage. Similarly, this weekend I feel as though we were pretty much the same team yesterday as today, fought just as hard and brought the same solid strategies and skills, but were more successful doing so during today's more favorable match-up.

Happy Valley, by the way, went on to lose to the number 1 seed, Rocky Mountain Rollergirls, by only 100 points. There's another metric by which they were simply a stronger team than us right now. Having just now watched RMRG win their way through Calgary to tomorrow's championship game, I don't think we'd have done nearly as well against them as Happy Valley did.

And that would have been us playing RMRG if we'd won yesterday. And we would have lost. And then we would have most likely lost tomorrow to E-Ville. And that wouldn't have been as emotionally satisfying as today's win followed by our private afterparty at the hotel celebrating a veteran jammer who is retiring at the end of the season. After more than seven years with BCB and still more years than that in derby, she played her last game with us today. ALL THE FEELS were present in a big way. Also all the alcohol.

Omaha Rollergirls have been an amazing host league. Everything has gone swimmingly. Each day has gone according to schedule, and it has been clear at every moment where we needed to be. Each team was assigned a wrangler, and I can only hope the other teams had as amazing a wrangler as we did. Our wrangler was nothing less than an MVP. She took care of us in every way. She got our locker room set up, got our coaches and captains to their meetings on time, made sure we knew when our on-skates warm up was, found our bags when we lost them, high-fived us on our way out to the track, joined in with us for our silly pre-bout team bonding games and our off-skates warmup, asked us to teach her our cheers and then got led us in chanting them through the tunnels on our way to the track for today's game. She even made sure, by request, that the DJ played "Rock Lobster" for us during our on-skates warm-up. Then she boogied down on the side of the track with pompoms and red silicone lobster claws. Basically she was 100% on team BCB all weekend long. She went above and beyond to make our tournament experience not only positive but joyous. We felt so loved!

And so ends the All Stars' season, on a higher note than we could have dreamed. We've come a long way since that terrible Sunday night in June.

Tomorrow we get an unlooked-for rest day in which to relax in the stands and enjoy watching the final games of the tournament. You can watch too! (You can also listen to the live audio broadcast for free.) Then, after a little well-deserved time off, (how little will vary by the skater), the All Stars move into support mode for our Bombshells, who are preparing for our annual B-Team tournament in September--which this year is being presented as part of Denver Roller Derby's "Thin Air Throwdown," which showcases some of the very highest-level derby in the world. We'll be helping to host the three-day event, and before that, we'll be on the track at practice and scrimmage helping the Bombshells get the most out of their final month of training before playing their part in that season finale.

And after that the whole league segues into our off-season, with a lower-key combined practice schedule for all our skaters, lesser attendance requirements, and a chance to work on our skills outside of the pressure-cooker environment of the regular season when the next bout had been always just around the corner.

And next week, once I'm back in Boulder, I'm going to finally have a little time before the end of August for short story revisions and submissions. Yay!