“...and I didn't know how it was going to end until I got there, which is the best and the worst kind of writing.”
Neil Gaiman

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

the actual physical health stuff that supports the actually writing, and also the skating
Thu 2017-02-23 23:39:10 (single post)

Hello! I'm back. We'll see if it sticks.

This is going to be an injury recovery update post rather than a writing update post. That's because there is more to report on the former at this time, and what there is to report keeps multiplying, and the thing about "this is going to be a really long post" is that it comes with a side of "and I haven't the time or energy to write it today." You can see how that's a downward spiral with no cut-off switch, right? Right.

So!

I am midway through my 6th week post-sprain. Wednesday last week, as I mentioned before, I got the OK to strap on skates. Since then, it went like this:

  • Wednesday: some 15 minutes and 3/4 mile of street skating (as reported earlier)
  • Thursday: some 20 minutes or so on the track at our practice space before NSOing our regularly scheduled scrimmage
  • Friday and Saturday: some unmeasured time at the inline hockey rink in North Boulder
  • Sunday: Travel team practice; it was all more or less non-contact (evasive jammer maneuvers around cones and stationary non-skating coaches) and none of it hurt
  • Monday: Phase 1 practice and off-skates conditioning, some of the latter being perhaps a bit ambitious at this stage in the game
  • Tuesday: After my physical therapist confirmed that I hadn't set my recovery back any, but that I really should go easy on the strengthy stuff for a day, travel team practice minus any scrimmage-format drills or strength conditioning. I ventured a small amount of controlled and limited contact (a pairs-blocking drill with, in my trio's case, the intensity scaled back a bit).

Then yesterday I woke up with a post-nasal drip sore throat and all the aching muscles, which is apparently how my body tells me LIE DOWN ALREADY AND TAKE A DAY OFF. I took the day off.

Today my PT again confirmed my recovery was continuing on track (though she volunteered nothing about my chances of full-contact performance next week). I went to NSO at scrimmage again and skated for some 20 minutes before first whistle.

Tomorrow I am not skating because 1. I'm doing all the other things, like visiting a writer friend for lunch, attending the 300 Suns release party for the results of their "colaBEERation" with us, and also finishing up the Friday Fictionette due that day. (It is coming along slowly, but it's turning out to be a ton of fun to write), and figuring out what to bring to a brand new writing group that's meeting Saturday... and also 2. because I get the hint, already, body, I'm listening this time, please don't shut me down again like that, OK? Yesterday morning was unfun and painful!

You can see from the above paragraph that I will have plenty of actually writing to report in upcoming posts if I actually manage to stay on this daily blogging wagon this time. Stay tuned, I guess?

many of whose hours weren't all that conducive to recovery, as it turns out
Mon 2015-10-26 23:25:09 (single post)

It's Recovery Monday! I had a lovely time at Mile Hi Con, but it was a con after the nature of cons, which is to say, exhausting. I can't swear I got more than 5 hours sleep on either night, and the drive was pretty dang tiring for being "local." Now, I feel like a terrible wimp saying this, because goodness knows John had a convention weekend and a drive between Boulder and Albequerque, but there it is: Just attending a con that's an hour's drive away, or two depending on traffic, wears me out.

The shenanigans involving coordinating auto maintenance and a rental car on either side of the trip didn't exactly help, mind you.

So anyway, long story short (too late!), I slept in this morning.

I've been off skates for a week because of resting the foot/ankle Tuesday, having scrimmage called off due to rain Thursday, and playing truant in order to enjoy Mile Hi Con's Sunday programming, but today I geared up again to take my turn helping to train our Phase 1 training class. Great bunch of skaters, all terrifically determined to master their crossovers and transitions; the improvement and increased confidence just over the course of this one practice was amazing. And of course I did everything right along with them, which means I'm all worn out--a close focus on basic maneuvers for two hours straight is no joke, not even for an experienced skater. This on top of deciding to ride my bike to practice, and I was glad I'd slept in. I may in fact go to bed early tonight.

The bike thing was because I don't quite trust the car not to fail to start. Our usual mechanic discovered a failing ignition control module, which, seeing as how they'd just put that one in less than a year ago, they replaced at no charge under warranty. (This is why it was worth having it towed to the usual mechanic, rather than leaving it in the care of the very nice shop next door to the place I found myself becalmed on Friday.) They put the new part in and the car started up just fine--but when I tried to drive it home today, it wouldn't start for me. They coaxed some life into it, and it hasn't failed me since, but that was only this afternoon. If there's any possibility of it failing to start in the near future, I'd as soon not have that be on a friend's farm, as it seems unkind to inflict a tow truck upon her property and animals and all. So I biked. I thought it would take me 30 minutes; it took about 50. I was able to catch a ride back from a very kind skater who lives up the road from me. She was extraordinarily patient with the whole big production required to get my bike to fit in her car.

So, yeah, that was my recovery day. Not all that "recovery," now that I look back on it.

A quick bit of Puzzle Pirates content, since I once again didn't manage to put any YPP content up on Sunday: Brigand King sightings do not in fact appear to count toward the October Seal o' Piracy. I have hard data on this! Both Oshun/Meridian and Millefleur/Emerald failed to acquire the trophy after travel + BK, then were awarded the Seal upon completing a Buried Treasure expedition. Meanwhile, four of my other pirates got the Seal with travel + Imperial Outpost or travel + shipwreck/treasure haul. So I can only conclude that BK sightings do not count, but buried treasure, shipwrecks, and imperial outposts do. And traveling around the ocean, of course.

I'm still working on my Ice pirate. Perhaps I'll buy her a Viking Raid map that's small enough to be able to win solo (I'm usually the only person logged onto the Ice server, which is no surprise, because Ice) and see if that counts. I keep sailing her up and down the route between Wemadeit and Maelstrom, and all I get are these lousy Kraken Hunt maps. No expeditions and no effin' map to Mini Island, drat the luck.

Update: Teshka on Ice was awarded her Seal o' Piracy upon buying the Viking Raid map. That is weird!

The other YPP news is that apparently there will be changes implemented to a couple scheduling aspects of blockades, but I'll go into that on Saturday when it's next time to blog blockades. If you're curious, the info's here.

And that's all. I will go fall over unconscious now. G'night!

Cover art features original photography by the author of something that's actually, despite my efforts, not bubbly.
this fictionette went shopping for mead, and hijinks ensued
Fri 2015-10-23 23:23:32 (single post)
  • 1,451 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 4,668 words (if poetry, lines) long

Compared to my usual eleventh hour stunts, this week's Fictionette got done ridiculously early. Par for this week's course, happily. I got up early to see John off--he hit the road for New Mexicon--and then I got right to work so that I'd be able to go to a convention myself. MileHiCon's programming started at 2:00 PM, and I planned to be there.

So, yeah, I pretty much did my morning shift right away and straight through, and when I was done, "I Didn't Ask for Champagne" was up at Patreon and it had only gone twenty past noon. Go me!

But I still didn't make it to the con in time to catch the two o'clock panel. This is because, in the parking lot of Redstone Meadery, just when I'd finished purchasing gifts for a friend and was ready to make the hour-long drive to the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center, the car died. The engine simply died before I'd even put the car in reverse, and it would not start again. It was 1:00 PM.

What followed was a long call to AAA from the tasting room of Redstone Meadery, and a short wait therein, which was followed by my car being towed to its usual mechanic and myself at the wheel of a Mitsubishi Mirage rented from the nearby Hertz. When I at last began my drive out of Boulder, it was 2:30 PM. Pretty slick, I have to admit. What could have wrecked my weekend plans was reduced to mere inconvenience, and not even that much expense. Gods of travel, bless the Triple A.

(Not that much expense so far. The rental was under $35 for the whole weekend, but we'll see what the bill comes to when the Saturn gets diagnosed.)

The next hour was taken up with construction traffic on Highway 36 which began very early on the Foothills on-ramp. The hour after that, with normal traffic on I-25. But I had Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap to keep me company, so I laughed a lot instead of raging at the road.

Then I finally made it to the hotel around 4:30 PM and was in the audience by 5:00 to hear Kevin and Ursula live--Ursula Vernon is the artist guest of honor, and Kevin Sonney was not shy about contributing to her GoH hour, to everyone's enjoyment. Connie Willis took over at 6:00 to talk to us about foreshadowing and which movies do it well (or poorly), opening ceremonies were at 7:00, dinner was overpriced but delicious salmon at the hotel restaurant, and at 9:00 Carrie Vaughn interviewed Kevin Hearne in the style of her series heroine's "Midnight Hour" radio show on KNOB. There was ranting about conspiracy theorists and speculation about Bigfoot. Everything was splendid. We lived happily after ever. The end.

Oh, except I still had two more hours of workday to live up to, and a short story to line-edit. Well. I'm finishing that up now, aren't I?

The story has not yet been submitted, despite my hopes. That's OK. It wasn't for lack of working on it. Line edits are simply taking longer than expected. My bad for expecting them to be so quick! This is the stage where I do get to bring out my inner perfectionist and let her try to get every sentence in every paragraph right. Within reason, anyway. I expect I'll be all, "That's FINE, let it GO, just SUBMIT the dang thing" by about Wednesday.

Tomorrow: Breakfast off-site! And then at 9:30 AM I will have a dilemma: Do I go to the SFWA business meeting, or do I throw in my lot with a Wreckin' Roller Rebels skater who's giving the kids a sock-footed lesson in roller derby? THIS IS A HARD CHOICE no, I'm serious, it actually is. I mean it. Don't laugh!

Local Editions Books and Coffee
Meet local authors in Longmont this Wednesday
Mon 2015-10-19 20:00:00 (single post)

There's a new(ish) Meetup.com group in the area, and it sounds really exciting. It's called Longmont Meet The Authors and it does exactly what it says on the tin. You come to their meetups in Longmont, you get to meet local authors. How cool is that?

(This, by the way, was the blog post I was going to publish to Examiner back on Thursday. But since Examiner and I seem to be done with each other, you get it here! Enjoy.)

So I heard about the way I usually hear about new Meetup.com groups, which is by having signed up for notifications relevant to my interest. I hear about enough new Meetup.com groups that way that I could probably do a monthly series about "Newest writing meetups in the Boulder area!" and never hurt for material. (I also hear about a lot of new Meetup.com groups that aren't much to do with writing, despite that "Writing" is the only interest I've listed on my profile. I suspect some meetup leaders choose their "we're about" tags somewhat indiscriminately.)

Anyway, having heard about the group some couple months ago, I'm a little annoyed with myself for not having gone to a meetup yet. I'm hoping to make this next one:

Meet New Authors
Who: Debra Jason (Millionaire Marketing on a Shoestring Budget)
Who Else: Stan Moore (Mister Moffat's Road)
When: Wednesday, October 21, 6:30-8:00 PM
Where: Local Editions Books and Coffee
(2919 17th Ave. Ste. 110, Longmont, CO)

Debra Jason's book is about business promotion and social media. Stan Moore's is about the namesake of the Moffat Tunnel--the man with the plan to build a railway line from Denver to Salt Lake City. As for Local Editions, it sounds like the perfect place for this particular Meetup.com group; it's a tiny little bookstore that carries absolutely nothing but books by local authors. And if you are a local author, you should probably introduce yourself to the proprietors...

...one of whom, coincidentally, is the organizer of Longmont Meet The Authors. Funny how that works...

So, in short: Join local meetup, go to local bookstore, meet local authors and buy their books. Winning!

Click to view original watercolor illustration by Kay Nielsen
this fictionette ain't goin' nowhere but maybe round the corner for a beer
Sat 2015-10-03 00:40:49 (single post)
  • 1,026 words (if poetry, lines) long

The first Friday Fictionette for October is a small folk tale retelling, or a folk tale fanfic if you will. It's called "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and it posits a lot more communication and common sense than is the norm in folk tales. I mean, seriously, a girl's got more senses than just her sight. If her mother imagines that her daughter needs a candle to tell whether the guy she's sharing her bed isn't a Troll, her mother has a very innocent idea of what goes on in bed. That's all I'm saying.

I was astounded to discover that all of Kay Nielson's gorgeous watercolor illustrations for the folk tale collection East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North are as much in the public domain as the text itself--or at least they are covered by "no known copyright restrictions." I incorporated one of these illustrations for the Fictionette cover art, because it's lovely and because it helps make clear exactly what folk tale I'm playing with.

I've also released a Fictionette Freebie for September, and it's "The Celebrated Frog Forger of Clackamas County." The PDF chapbook and the MP3 audiofictionette are now both available for free to subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. Enjoy!

And with that we head into the weekend. If you're in the neighborhood and want to hang out, I'll be among the crowd helping local brewery (and Boulder County Bombers sponsor!) 300 Suns celebrate their Grand Re-Opening on Saturday afternoon. Bring a game to play, buy some beer, and enjoy their new menu! That's what I'm gonna do. (My, that Lushious Belgian Ale with the ginger and lavender sounds tasty...)

Cover art incorporates the actual view out my actual window.
this fictionette skated by faster than the eye can follow
Mon 2015-07-20 23:29:54 (single post)
  • 1,159 words (if poetry, lines) long

I swear I got the Friday Fictionette done on time! Early, in fact. It's called "Protective Coloration" and it's got more fairy-like creatures in the corner of the protagonist's eye. It only took about two hours to proof, publish, and record the PDF and MP3. I wasn't up until stupid o'clock getting it done, either, which was way cool.

But then I ran off to skate at ROLL and was up until stupid o'clock for that reason.

Honestly, I thought I'd only stay until maybe 11:00 PM. That would give me a good two hours of fun, and an exit for when the track got crowded and the crowd got drunk. I'm also, admittedly, not a fan of the DJ. I don't understand why you'd have a Thunderdome-themed skate party and never actually play "We Don't Need Another Hero," or an '80s-themed skate party and then mash up the classic anthems of the decade you are supposedly celebrating such that there's no melody line left to sing along to. But being on skates makes everything wonderful, at least for a little while. So I go, I have fun, and when I stop having fun, I leave. I figured that after about two hours I'd run off to a diner to write up a blog post and get a couple other things done.

But I surprised myself by not actually stopping having fun. As it happened, I didn't leave until they kicked everyone out of Tracks at 2:00 AM. So that was a thing.

It helped that I had friends with me--a couple of gals from my roller derby league met me there, and we hung out. It also helped that we spent Peak Crowded Drunken Hour in the karaoke lounge. (It is possible that the skate floor DJ played "We Don't Need Another Hero" while I was in the karaoke lounge. I would not bet on it, however.) And the singers and their supporters were friendly, and the songs chosen ran the gamut from metal to hip-hop to blues to Broadway. When the karaoke DJ shut it down, we went back out to the main floor for the last 15 minutes of the party, and we discovered it was practically deserted. Plenty of room to try fun dance moves or just skate fast. "I didn't know ROLL shut down with a speed skate," I said.

Anyway, that's why I didn't finish my homework on Friday.

The unicorn looking on is Velvet. He's been with me almost all my life, and he likes to be included in things.
outmoded, inconvenient, messy, elegant, satisfying
Wed 2015-07-15 23:37:55 (single post)
  • 1,141 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 2,850 words (if poetry, lines) long

Pictured here is my second-hand typewriter, a Sears Tower which appears to be identical to the 1950s-era portable Smith-Corona Sterling. I bought it from a co-worker back in the late '90s. Then, upon my lamenting that it had features I'd no idea how to use, I was sent a copy of the Sterling's owners' manual by a Usenet acquaintance who guessed my typewriter was largely the same as his. (This was before it was trivial to find PDFs of owners' manuals of just about everything online--though, admittedly, I haven't found the exact document my friend sent me. This is the closest match I've located. My typewriter doesn't have those CL and SET buttons on the right.) That gift empowered me to use the ingenious Page Gage (sic) feature to get consistent bottom margins every time. It's a seriously clever thing.

Five years ago, this typewriter was instrumental in drafting the first recognizable version of "First Breath." This week it'll be key in fulfilling some long overdue Patreon pledge rewards. I owe two, soon to be three "fictionettes in your mailbox" to my $5+ tier patron. This is where, at the end of the month, I type out one of the month's fictionettes, correct some of the typos with white-out, watercolor and scribble and sketch on it, and send it off with my thanks.

At the moment, I am offering this thank-you to the first ten $5+ patrons. That may have been overly optimistic. I am thinking of lowering that maximum to five. A thousand words feels a lot longer on a typewriter than on a laptop. Accordingly, I find myself sometimes revising on the fly and cutting out phrases that no longer seem absolutely necessary. Or rearranging phrases because I got ahead of myself and I am not going back to correct it.

Also, mastering the Dvorak keyboard layout seems to have come at the expense of being able to touch-type in Qwerty. So I do a lot of looking up and looking down between the computer screen and the typewriter keys and the typewriter output, and losing my place in the original document, and shit there went the 1-inch marker on the Page Gage about two lines ago, I guess the bottom margin is going to be a little smaller than planned...

I'm not really complaining. I'm just griping. The difference is, complaints are meant to be actionable but griping is only recreational. I don't seriously want not to do this. I'm enjoying the exercise--reacquainting myself with the typewriter, producing a literary artifact, enjoying the messy elegance of the results (it's not the most precise instrument, this Tower), and creating a physical object as a token of my appreciation. And sending it in the mail! Having an excuse to mail physical letters is wonderful. It's inconvenient and outmoded and I love it. I'm in love with the written word in all its forms. Look, I do my morning pages with a fountain pen. Of course I love the typewriter and the U.S. Post.

Anyway, I intend to finish the May mailable tonight and maybe produce tomorrow the one that was due at the end of June. That'll will put me back on track in time to type up the July mailable at the end of the month. Huzzah! Getting caught up is the best!

Cover art incorporates public domain photograph by Nancy Heise (Wikimedia Commons)
this fictionette proceeded from a sinister game of mad libs
Fri 2015-07-10 23:57:04 (single post)
  • 1,149 words (if poetry, lines) long

Oh my goodness, two on-time fictionettes in a row. It's like she's finally got her act together, folks. And here it is: "Ill Met by Moonlight," a Friday Fictionette whose title aptly demonstrates the value of serif fonts. It's about long nights spent talking to yourself and being startled when something answers back.

As I mention in the author's note, the original freewriting session resulted not so much in a plot as a plot template. I used for writing prompts the two words assigned to the morning and evening "dashes" over at Virtual Writers' World; for June 12 they were "blench" and "angle". I had no idea what to do with that. Also, I was terribly distracted. That was the Friday I spent in the car driving to Lincoln, Nebraska for a roller derby bout on Saturday, and the car was full of people being fascinating and entertaining pretty much nonstop.

But I tried! I took the two words and I recast them and I made a sentence: "He looked at it from a different angle, and went pale with horror at what he saw." I mistook "blench" for "blanch" there. I'd have looked up the definition online via John's smartphone's wifi tether, but we were passing through a dead zone at the time. If you like, you can rewrite the sentence to say "flinched with horror" and get the same results.

After a few minutes I got frustrated with just staring at the screen and/or rephrasing the basic premise ("Main character discovers the horrific underbelly of his daily life! Which will never be the same again!") and gave myself an assignment that would force me to get specific. You may of course borrow this assignment for your own use, should it look useful.

Basically, the assignment was to make four arbitrary decisions. Decide on the REALM, REALITY, FACADE, and METHOD involved.

REALM: In other words, the context in which the character makes a discovery. I mentally flipped a coin/rolled some dice/threw a dart and got "Corporate office."

REALITY: What's the secret the character discovers? What's the true nature of reality that they've hitherto been been unaware of? "The corporation is sitting on an exclusive trading gateway with Faerie."

FACADE: What's the nature of the deception? How is the REALITY covered up from everyday eyes? "Import of cheap goods for distribution to dollar stores."

METHOD: Whereas REALITY was the secret fact about the character's world, METHOD is the action being taken which is premised upon that reality. So. Given a corporation secretly sitting on a gateway to Faerie for economic exploit, how does that corporation in fact exploit their exclusive access? "Smuggling magic items into our world, and into particular pairs of hands, via dollar store distribution."

Thus the "plot template" got filled out with a viable story idea. Finally.

Depending on your plot template, you may pick different key words. But the point is to identify the key decisions you're holding back from making, and then darn well make them.

Remember, writing fiction is about making arbitrary decisions. There are no wrong decisions, except for the decision not to decide. Every decision moves you closer to the story you're going to write. Ta-da.

having more to read all of a sudden is kind of a mixed blessing
Tue 2015-05-12 23:36:16 (single post)

Habitual readers of the actually writing blog will have noticed habitual mention of an online writing community called Codex. Now, I am here to tell you today that you, too, can join Codex if you, too, are neo-pro speculative fiction writer. And if you are, you should. I will tell you why.

Membership in Codex is free, but depends on the applicant having met one of a number of criteria. All of them are detailed on the page linked above. Just for example, when I applied, I qualified under two different criteria, those being having made a SFWA-qualifying sale of fiction ("First Breath" to the anthology Blood and Other Cravings) and in having attended the Viable Paradise workshop. Agent representation, award nomination, and successful self-publishing are also vectors for qualification. Again, click the link and check it out.

Why should you join? Well, for one thing, the Codex community runs a number of contests throughout the year, and contests are really great sources of motivation.

Some are very casual. Every two months, there's a new forum thread where you can report each manuscript submission as you send it out. Whoever does the most submissions for that two-month period gets bragging rights and maybe a lovely doodle by the contest host, something like that. The prize is not the point. The point is to start thinking of manuscript submissions as something you can darn well do a lot of. Just by actively keeping up with the thread and reading others' submission reports, I find myself thinking things like, "Wait, don't I have a manuscript that came back last week with a rejection letter? I wonder if this magazine that so-n-so just reported a submission to would be a good fit. Time to send that sucker back out again!" or, "They take reprints? I didn't know that publisher took reprints! I have just the thing to send them."

See? Motivation!

I've participated in more formal ones, too, like the annual Weekend Warrior competition. That's where between Friday afternoon and Sunday night you write a brand new short-short story based on one of several provided prompts. During the weekdays, you read each other's entries (which are anonymized) and you vote on them. Come the following Friday, the process starts again. And this goes on for a whole bunch of weeks in a row. (I think it was five.) By the end of the contest, you've written a bunch of new flash fiction and you've gotten helpful comments from other contest participants to guide you in the rewrite. One of my Weekend Warrior shorts, in a heavily revised form, went on to be accepted and published ("Other Theories of Relativity" on Toasted Cake). This is not an unusual fate for a Weekend Warrior story.

The contest I'm currently participating in, the Title Rummage Sale, is similar, but it's for full-length stories and your prompt is whatever title you choose from the list of available titles. The deadline was Sunday night. This week, we're all reading each other's stories so we can vote and comment on them next week. This means that not only have I written a brand new 1500-word story, but now I get to read a bunch of brand-new 1500-5000 word stories.

I don't know about you, but for me, getting to read a bunch of new stories written by my fellow Codexians is a real treat. Also, my eyes are among the first ever to see these stories. One day, when they are published and are wowing readers the world over, I will be able to say I knew it when.

(And maybe someone will eventually say the same about one of my stories. Exciting!)

So! Bundles of writing motivation and oodles of new reading material! What's not to like? I mean, other than the problem of having more things to read when I ought to be taking more time to write, of course. But isn't that always the way?

this is what i read when i was supposed to be writing
i distract you with an awesome book by someone else
Fri 2015-05-08 23:35:00 (single post)

So, I got nothing. No excuses, no good reasons, and almost nothing to show for this week on the writing front. Not even a blog post (barring this one). And now I am two fictionettes behind schedule, which is not a good sign.

You know how it is. Probably, I mean. You get behind in one thing, then you get behind in more things, and the more you think, "I will get All Caught Up now!" the more the pressure of that expectation weighs down on you until you can't move even the littlest bit, and then you get behind some more.

At least, that's how it is for me.

I'm going to try to get All Caught Up this weekend, but even making that statement in the form of an "I'll try" assertion gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Today was going to be my All Caught Up day, and I even managed to get up on time for it! (Part of this week's problem was a constant day-to-day wrestling match with my sleep schedule.) But we also had a plan to go to Loveland for lunch and roller derby shopping. Skate Ratz was having a sale (they still are!), and they are two blocks down from Mo' Betta Gumbo (I had a fried oyster po' boy and a swamp water cocktail with okra infusion). So as it got closer and closer to time to leave, my nemesis brain said, "You know, you can do all that work/writing stuff after you get home..." And then, after getting back to Boulder and dropping some items off at Hazardous Waste Disposal and picking up some boxes from storage and getting groceries and unloading the car, weasel brain said, "It's OK, you have time to nap. And read! You brought more books home! Read one!" And then after napping and reading it was... late. And stupid monkey brain said, "Well, you can always get All Caught Up tomorrow."

And that, my friends, is how my brain works. Or doesn't work, to be precise. That nasty little saboteur.

The book, by the way, was Ink by Damien Walters Grintalis. Damien is a fellow member of Codex, and I was privileged to meet her face to face for the first time at a recent World Horror Convention in New Orleans. I bought her book, eagerly asked her to deface it for me, brought it back to Boulder... and somehow never managed to read it until now.

It was awesome. Which is to say, it was an awesome novel in the creepy body horror genre with a variation on "the magic shop that isn't there when you look for it again later." These things, especially the creepy body horror, are not everyone's cup of tea. But if this is the sort of thing you would like, it is an excellent example of the sort of thing you would like. I liked it bunches.

I admit, me and this book got off to a rocky start, despite knowing and having a lot of respect for the author. The main character showed up on the first page of the second chapter sounding like a whiny boy-child griping about how his wife just up and left him, but he's glad she's gone because she was a horrible controlling jerk. Only he didn't say "jerk." And so I began to worry.

Actually, I expected his story to end very quickly, as the First Victim of the Big Bad. That is often the fate of the Horribly Sexist Stereotype introduced in the first pages of a horror novel. It lets you feel all schadenfreudy when the Big Bad gets him. Horror can be an intensely moralizing genre, where Bad People are Punished For Their Sins by being the First Victims by which we are introduced to the Big Bad. (Think of the slasher film trope wherein the first victims are the young couple who park their car somewhere remote and proceed to initiate sexyfuntimes.) This can be either problematic or satisfying to the reader, depending on how well the reader's sense of morality overlaps with those of the author.

But as the pages turned, it became clear that he would last at least most of the book through--it really was his story--and that the ex was exactly as awful as advertised. So I started to worry some more, despite my faith in the author. I have seen books that start that way, and they don't often end well.

But very, very soon, other female characters began showing up on the page, and it became abundantly clear that the controlling jerk ex was not a stand in for all women or all wives, because all the other women in the novel's cast of characters (mother, girlfriend, nieces, neighbors' kids, random encounters) are all different from each other in interesting ways. None of them are two-dimensional stereotypes. All of them have inner lives. The ones that come the closest to being stereotypes still each have at least one noticeable and deliberate moment of acting contrary to type. And the male protag, he rapidly gets more likable as he, too, gets to show off his other dimensions. I wanted to hug him and protect him from the Big Bad, and I was glad he had people in his life to do just that.

The care the author put into each character was obvious. And, well, I'm not surprised, since I know the author (for "converse online from time to time" values of know). But being unsurprised doesn't preclude being relieved, nor does it diminish what a refreshing read Ink was. That's how you do it, world. Go forth and do likewise.

Also, I would love to see more novels in which the characters occasionally talk to each other as though they've read Captain Awkward and have internalized some of those scripts. It tends to result in a plot that turns on actual problems and not artificial ones created by shitty communication. Seriously, when the protag says (and this is a paraphrase, not a direct quote, because I haven't reread enough to be able to find specific quotes quickly), "Mom, I'm sorry. You have to accept that the marriage has ended. You are free to stay friends with my ex, but you can't expect us to stay married for you." How awesome is that? That is so awesome. (And then Mom does accept it at last because Mom is not a stereotype. She is a character who also grows and changes through the story, despite being a supporting character who isn't on stage a lot. AWESOME.)

So: Sorry for taking so long to read it, Damien! But I've read it now and I loved it!

And now... wish me luck, because Catch-up Weekend starts tomorrow at 8 AM.

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