“When writing doesn't work, the writer is assumed to be the guilty party.”
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

Cover art incorporates vulture photograph by Daniel Daley (CC BY 2.0)
this fictionette is preparing to take a trip
Fri 2015-12-18 23:58:40 (single post)
  • 1,128 words (if poetry, lines) long

The Friday Fictionette for December 18 is up! After some angsty deliberation (I hate coming up with titles), I called it "What Your Name is Worth," because that's pretty much what it's about. It's sort of Weird West, which isn't generally my thing; I just went where the writing prompt pointed. You know how it goes.

The link above goes to a brief excerpt hosted on Patreon. These links go to the full-length PDF and MP3 editions, which may be downloaded by subscribers at the $1 and $3 per month pledge tiers respectively. All the details about the Friday Fictionettes project are over here.

Once I got that published, I thought, "Hey, how about I post another excerpt to Wattpad?" I've been so very, very behind in posting the fictionette excerpts to Wattpad. I've been catching up, one excerpt at a time, as and when I have time. And supposedly anything that goes up on a Friday has a much better chance of being "discovered" than stuff that goes up most other days of the week, so, OK, I posted "...Champagne." That's the one from October 23, so I'm getting close to caught up at least.

And then I thought, "I have time, why not get a little more caught up in back-filling the meta-data from the earlier fictionettes?" Which is to say, the Scrivener fields in which I jot down the URLs of the PDF, MP3, and fictionette excerpt on Patreon, and the corresponding excerpt on Wattpad, and the corresponding excerpt on my blog. Not to mention title and date and wordcount and the date of the freewriting session the fictionette is based on, because I want to keep track of stuff like that. Some of these fields got added late in the game, so they were blank for many of the earlier fictionettes. Some of these fields I just forgot to fill in once in a while.

Much of the data I needed in order to back-fill the meta-data fields could only be retrieved by combing back... and back... and back through the Patreon and Wattpad archives. Both of them work like this: You go to the "Works" or "Posts" page, which loads the most recent handful of items. You page all the way to the bottom of the screen. If it's Patreon, it detects you've scrolled all the way down and says, "Loading more posts..." for a few seconds. If it's Wattpad, you click "show more," and you also wait for a few seconds. After waiting for a few seconds, it loads the next handful of items. And then you scroll down to the bottom of the page and you do it again. And again. And again.

And then I thought, "This is such a pain! Why don't I just get all caught up on meta-data right now so that I never, ever, ever have to go through this again?"

And that, dear readers, is why fictionette procedures took about four hours today.

A mostly unscheduled weekend looms. Saturday, for once, I've got nothing on the calendar at all--well, a couple of very brief errands, no big deal, but no events, you know?--so I'm going to hang out with my loving, lovable, and miraculously supportive husband. Sunday would usually be roller derby practice, but this Sunday is the third and final allotted session for travel team tryout skills evaluations, and I've already done mine. Besides, this being the final tryout session, John will probably wind up in a coaches' meeting long into the afternoon to finalize travel team rosters. I'd just be awkwardly trying to avoid overhearing confidential things while waiting impatiently to go home. So instead I'm just going to stay home in the first place. Glorious.

Then on Monday evening I fly to New Orleans for the holidays. So I suppose I'll spend Monday in a state of pre-travel stress. Yay? Yay.

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