author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hello and happy 4th of July! No big plans at our household, just eating good food, being lazy, spoiling the bunny, and trying to tune out the random party noises from next door. Also the random explosions (fireworks) that, oddly enough, don't seem to bother the aforementioned bunny. Let's start off with a picture of Mister Captain Holland Fuzzy Bunderpants, why don't we, so you can see for yourself just how unflappable that guy is.

It's a day off from roller derby, and I'm taking advantage of the extra evening writing time to do a blog post. For once! When did I last post here--May? Seriously? OK then. Here's the round-up of Stuff What I Been Up To Since May.

When last we left off with the blog's intrepid hero, she was about to drive off to Salt Lake City for a couple of roller derby bouts. (Two, not three; one of our opponents had to withdraw at the last minute because of a COVID outbreak within their league. It's still out there, y'all. Mask up and be safe.) Well, we won the sanctioned game by a decent amount and we lost the regulation game by not much at all, doing our rankings no harm thereby.

The games were fun, and so were the team's various excursions around the city. Team dinner was at The Bayou, where I had something they called "alligator cheesecake." It was more like a souffle, except with a graham cracker crust, and I will have to take their word that there was actual alligator sausage in there. Tasty, in any case. There was also a smaller lunch outing to Mark of the Beastro, address 666 S. State Street. A+, would dine on vegan omelets with Satan again.

But dearest to me was the morning after everything was over, after I had checked out of the hotel, when I met one of my oldest and closest friends for a walk around the park before hitting the highway for home. There we are in the photo gallery, all big smiles with tulips in the background. Love you bunches, Cat--let's try not to take so long about seeing each other again! Give your doggos lots of love from me, and all the best to your family.

After Salt Lake, our next engagement was a home bout (sanctioned) against No Coast Roller Derby on June 24. The visiting team won that one, but a number of them assured me that we did not make it easy. It was a very hard fought game. As for the afterparty, I honestly couldn't say who won that one. Both teams showed up in strength and numbers and with great appetite. There was an after afterparty down the street at a sandwich shop and bar for those still hungry after the first location's kitchen closed, but I was tired and did not go. Whoever won the afterparty, it was not me. I am at peace with that.

Next up, this Saturday will find us hosting a double header, two mix-up bouts featuring first the Boulder County Devils (our junior league) and the BCRD adults second. After that, the league will take a well-deserved four-week break!

In writing news, I have a brand new poem out in Eternal Haunted Summer, in their Summer Solstice 2023 issue. It's called Fiat Nox, and it's a sort of Miltonian call-out, I guess. Big thanks to the editor for picking a lovely illustration to pair with the poem!

Big thanks also to my teammate and that night's carpool partner who responded to my whining ("argh, tonight's the deadline, I wanted to send in a poem but I don't have one yet and I'm going to be tired after tonight's scrimmage") with the exhortation to GO! WRITE IT! IT'S NOT TOO LATE YET! YOU CAN DO IT! The fact that the poem got written at all, let alone submitted in time for the editor to consider it, is something like 90% her doing.

Meanwhile, I can attest that the whole Rhysling Finalist thing actually happened, because while I may have imagined many things, I am certain I didn't hallucinate the proof copy of the 2023 Rhysling Anthology that was sent my way. You can order this attractive volume for yourself at that link. Whether in print or PDF, I guarantee it's chock full of excellent poetry.

Oh and hey! Fibercraft news. I'm knitting a new pair of socks! They're all rainbow and they're not nearly tall enough yet.

All for now - more soon, I hope. I really do intend to do this once a week thing. Will I manage it? ONLY NEXT WEEK KNOWS.

Well, hi. So it turns out I have this blog. Let's brush the rust off the controls and do a round-up post of Stuff What I Been Up To Since January.

In roller derby news, which I'll start with because that's always a thing, my league, Boulder County Roller Derby (nee Boulder County Bombers), is thoroughly renamed and rebranded. We have jerseys with our new logo on the way and everything is very exciting. Meanwhile, our travel team program is up and running and so are WFTDA rankings. Sanctioned games are a thing again, and we have now played three of them: one against the Denver Standbys here at home, and two in the Taos-based Rumble on the Rio tournament a couple weekends ago. We won all three.

This weekend we're going to Salt Lake City to participate in Wasatch Roller Derby's Galactic Brawl tournmant. We'll be playing three games, two of which will be sanctioned. If there is live streaming of those games--and I don't know that there will be, but if there is--you'll hear about it via the host league's Facebook page (see the "Galactic Brawl" link).

In mundane life news, we lost a car and gained a car. The black 2013 Chevy Volt got totaled thanks to Some Dude rear-ending John, thereby causing a five-car pile-up on eastbound Arapahoe Road approaching 95th Street. Happy to report that there were no injuries! But, like I said, the Volt didn't make it. There followed a couple of weeks during which we were in far closer and more frequent contact with our insurance company than we generally like to be, meanwhile gaining a certain category of life experience we'd have been just fine never having to experience, thanks awfully.

And then we went looking for another used plug-in hybrid to replace the Volt with, and, wouldn't you know it, Boulder Hybrids had a red 2013 Chevy Volt with a price tag of not unreasonably much more than the settlement pay-out on the totaled Volt. Indeed, what with the replacement Volt being a Premium rather than an LT and having 10K fewer miles on its odometer, it was a damn good deal. And we drove that sucker to Taos for the aforementioned Rumble on the Rio tournament. And the 10-years-out-of-date onboard navigation system was entirely adequate to get us there (freeing up John's smartphone for very important business by which of course we mean VIDEO GAMES). So that all worked out.

In writing news: My poem, "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland", published in the Summer Solstice 2022 edition of Eternal Haunted Summer, made the Rhysling Award long list. The Rhysling Award is given each year by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, whose members each get to nominate one work in each of the poetry categories, long and short. There were slightly more than 100 preliminary nominees in the short poem category, which is quite a lot, but I got to be one of them, and that's pretty darn spiffy!

That was announced back in February. Fast forward to just now, when I went Googling about to see when the finalists would be announced, so I could mention that date here. Surprise, surprise--turns out, the finalists have been announced. While I'm still not seeing anything in SFPA's official communications, I found several blogs and poetry publications congratulating the finalists. For instance, here's File770.

There are 50 finalists in the short poem category, and my poem appears to be one of them. Eep!

An anthology of the finalists will be put together and mailed out soon, and the SFPA membership will begin voting in July to determine the eventual 2023 award recipients..

So... yeah. That's my news for the year so far. Happy Beltane!

OK, so, this week's post is kind of a bummer. Also a bit of a reprise, since I posted about it Monday over on Patreon.

Here's the thing: I'm leaving Habitica.

I know! I've boosted it so many times over the years! It's helped me organize my life in so many really useful ways! The camaraderie, the accountability, the joy of clicking a thing and saying "I did it!" and getting imaginary gold and experience points for it--these have all been good things! (Mostly good things, anyway. About that, more in a moment.) So what happened that suddenly I'm canceling my subscription and deleting my account?

Well... this.

That link goes to a Reddit thread that describes, in some detail, the abominable treatment that Habitica's volunteer community moderators have received from Habitica's paid staff team. And because I rarely ventured outside my various Guilds' social spaces, I had no idea anything was going until sometime last week, when a Mastodon acquaintance, who turned out to be one of Habitica former moderators, mentioned it. Anyway, if you want the full story, follow both links; and, on the Reddit thread, scroll down for comments by former moderators.

A brief and thus very imperfect summary of what transpired might look like this: A longstanding company culture of treating the mods with very little care, respect, or gratitude for their unpaid labor of love for the Habitica community culminated in the staff firing all the volunteer moderators in early December 2022, then declaring any discussion of the situation in Habitica's public spaces off-limits and against the Terms of Service. The inciting incident for the first firing was this: After a heroic after-hours effort by the mod team to deal with a fast-moving crisis in the message boards, one of the mods suggested that maybe the staff might say "thank you" once in a while.

Again, this is a summary, not the complete story. I have left out the steps between "How about a thank you?" and "We are taking moderation in-house." And there are some pretty horrific codas. Basically, click through the links above and you'll know as much as I do. If the length of the Reddit page is daunting, I can specifically recommend these comments by former moderators MaybeSteveRodgers and ALittleYellowSpider (Alys). But I think the whole thread is worth your time.

Anyway, I was appalled. I immediately decided I could not support the app anymore. I put myself "in the Inn" indefinitely (i.e. paused damage so I could ignore the app without my character or those of my party being punished for it), exported my user data so as not to lose track of my task lists, and began the process of letting my various communities know why I'm leaving. This blog post is part of that.

This blog post is also me realizing that maybe I'm better off without Habitica after all.

Not long ago, author Elizabeth Bear wrote an article about how "Gamification might be bad, actually?" and it got me thinking. Well, to be fair, it got me resisting. I've been using Habitica so long, it's been such an integral part of my day--how dare you suggest it might be bad for me? But since pausing damage and thus freeing myself from the obligation to check in, check the boxes, complete my task lists OR ELSE, I've been thinking about Bear's article a lot.

Every time I catch myself thinking, "I didn't water the plants today - but if I do it first thing tomorrow, I can justify checking the 'Water the plants' Daily." Every time I felt bad because I didn't "Feel good about your writing - and yourself!" and thus couldn't honestly check off that task. Every time I thought, "OK, posting the Monday Muse is blogging, so it's OK if I check 'actually writing blog' today even though I didn't post to the actually writing blog." Every time I regretted failing to do my daily physical therapy or was too tired to brush my teeth, regretted not because skipping those routines isn't good for my physical well-being but purely because it meant I'd leave a daily task incomplete--

Every time, in fact, that I thought of the things I want to or need to do every day in terms of whether I got to check a box, it brought home all over again that maybe, just maybe, task list gamification might be bad for me.

I think I still need some sort of task list manager--it could be an app, it could just be me writing a list of "What do I need to do today?" in my Morning Pages--because without lists I lose track of the day's wants and needs and, like I've said before, I just drift. (I've done a lot of useless drifting this past week, despite my best intentions.) But what I don't need is any further excuse to punish myself for failing to complete a task. I do that enough just in my own head--I don't need an app telling me how many hit points each party member lost because of my failure. And I need to retain a sense of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for the sake of checking a box.

OK, but no, I'm not leaving 4thewords any time soon. For one thing, it's not nearly as useful a tool for punishing my failures. If I don't make my 444 words for the day, I have oh so many stempos stockpiled for repairing my streak. For another, it's fun. It's got great community and lots of new content regularly and actively maintained software and a culture of listening to and respecting each other and please don't disillusion me on this point I could not take it

Anyway, that's where things stand for now.

At least one post per week: Check. I have not been uniformly On The Ball since last post, but this much I can do.

This week's post will be my "what I had published last year" roundup. It will be fairly short, because 2022 was not a great year for writing new things or submitting regularly. But there were some things published:

New poetry: "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland," Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer Solstice 2022 (theme: Other-Than-Human Realms).

In fairy folklore, there's a story that turns up now and again involving a human who gets invited into Fairyland to perform some necessary function, and has to have magic ointment applied to their eyes in order that they might see true while they're there. Much later, after their return home, a fairy looks them up in their day-to-day and asks them, "Which eye is it you see me out of?" Turns out they did an imperfect job of removing the magic ointment, which means they've got a loose end to tidy up. Can't be having random humans going around able to see fairies clearly! So the human answers, "The left eye," and the fairy says "Cool, thanks," and immediately puts out the human's left eye. As opposed to dunking them in a handy ditch to just, y'know, wash the ointment out. Because fairies are cruel and capricious and, above all, dramatic.

Anyway, I wanted to play with that trope, such that the "eye" that had to be put out was the photographer's camera (the photographer's services having been engaged for an important fairy wedding). The fairy would smash the camera, and maybe even blind the photographer (see above: cruel and capricious), but of course the photographer still has the negatives, which they would pass down to future generations along with the story of the photographer's adventures.

One day I will actually write that poem. Or story. It could be a story. In any case, it wasn't what I wrote in time for this submission deadline. I wrote this other thing instead.

Reprint poem: "Reasonable Accommodations," The Future Fire issue 2022.62

My poor little corporate weredeer first appeared in Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 (Winter 2021). You can still download that issue, but you'll have to do it from the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine," because the publication sadly had to close its doors before Issue 4 came out. In which issue, incidentally, another poem of mine they'd solicited had been set to appear. Alas. That poem remains unpublished, and not for want of my sending it out. Maybe 2023 will be its year.

Reprint story: "Survival, After," Apex Magazine 2021 (or via Weightless Books)

Originally published and podcast by Apex Magazine in August 2021, this story was included, along with every other story they published in 2021, in the magazine's yearly anthology. I understand it's their biggest table of contents yet! There's lots of amazing stuff in there that quite frankly blows my little tale out of the water, so it's well worth the price. Yes, you could just go read all the stories for free on the website, but the print anthology, in addition to being extremely convenient in providing all the content in one handy codex (no need to click all over the place! Just turn the pages!), is a truly gorgeous artifact. It would look beautiful on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Reprint story: "First Breath," penumbric speculative fiction mag vol vi issue 4 (December 2k22)

Originally published in Ellen Datlow's vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings (Tor Books, September 2011), this is my most reprinted work--less because of its classic staying power, I think, and more because it's the story I keep sending out in hopes of getting it reprinted. But this is its third outing (not counting its debut) so I guess editors like it. (Previous reprintings: Denver Horror Collective and the Tales to Terrify podcast.)

I'm saddened to discover the purchase pages for the original anthology are gone. But I suppose every anthology must go out of print sometime. You can still find copies via that online retailer named for a river in South America, because of course you can, but it's no longer available via Macmillan Publishing or Barnes & Noble that I can see. So instead I've linked the Publisher's Weekly write-up, which actually name-checks me (I was a "newcomer"! I arguably still am) so that's kinda cool.

I suppose that will be one of my 2023 goals: Get "First Breath" reprinted again.

Anyway, that's the 2022 Publications Roundup. As you run off to click the links and check them out, do check out the rest of the relevant issues (or the relevant year, in the case of Apex). There's some great stuff in those tables of contents, written by some enormously skilled wordsmiths, and you need to get your eyeballs on 'em STAT.

Until next week!

So, happy new year! I have res... um, goals. Goals and intentions. One of them is to blog here more regularly, which probably means shorter posts, each with only just one subject. It's the very long, complicated posts that make this daunting and also inappropriate for the brief couple hours between roller derby and bed. (Speaking of which: I am tired.) So let's make this a short post.

Like I said: Goals. Writing goals, mainly. They are as follows:

Make progress toward getting the Friday Fictionettes Project back on schedule, via a sustainable schedule. One that doesn't involve trying to do everything in one day, or even in one week. Recognize that I am a certain amount behind schedule, and that, just as I didn't get there all at once, I won't dig my way out of it overnight either. The plan is... well, I'm not going to describe my plan here, because that is how I jinx myself. But trust me. I've got a plan.

Receive 100 rejections in 2023. Which means submit my fiction and poetry at least 100 times. (Optimistically, not all of those will be rejections. The first year I attempted this goal was my most published year ever. Which, arguably, is the whole point of the exercise.) Not a new goal, not for me or anyone else, but one I've had for myself for several years running and which I failed spectacularly at last year. And not just because I didn't submit regularly, but also because I didn't...

Finish more stories and poems so that they can be submitted. One thing that really dampened my submission game was running out of pro-paying or near-pro-paying markets appropriate for the pieces I had to submit. Which can happen if one isn't constantly writing new things. So that's what I want to do: write new things, new things besides the Friday Fictionettes. Not that Friday Fictionettes can't become new things for commercial submission, mind you. It's happened before.

Post to this blog at least once a week. I mean, ideally three times a week, but one has to walk before one can run, and in this regard, metaphorically, I haven't even been upright. To expand that metaphor, one blog post per week seems like a reasonable equivalent to, say, getting out of bed and moving around the house a little, maybe cooking myself a simple but nutritious meal?

And, in service to all of those goals: Stick to a sustainable and productive daily schedule. I've developed one over the past few years, accruing a piece here, discarding a strategy there, until I'm pretty confident that I know what works for me, as long as I do it and don't lead myself off course by 1. screwing up my sleep schedule, or 2. getting lost in video games and social media. I have some real foibles in that area, such that Catherynne M. Valente's recent post about being a writer with ADHD resonated frighteningly. I am not diagnosed with ADHD, and I certainly don't feel qualified to diagnose myself, but wow a lot of failure states that writers with ADHD talk about sound familiar. The bit about, whatever I do first is the thing I'm going to do all day? And the other thing, the one about limited decision making capability, such that if it all gets used up early, there's none of it left for writing? Which is a problem, because writing is nothing but one decision after another? Yeah. Extremely familiar.

The coping strategies I hear about also sound familiar. Have I told you about all the lists? Everything is a list item. With a little box next to it for me to check it off when it's done, so that I can get a little wind back from the sheer delight of accomplishing a thing. Everything is in lists or else nothing gets done. Nothing but social media and video games. Because the lists focus my mind and make the things I have to do concrete. Without focus, without solidity, I'm just floating from distraction to distraction, and it's bad.

So I'm working on it. I have my schedule. I have my lists. I just have to stick to them, and everything will be fine. EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

Did I say "a short blog post"? Well, it's a single-subject blog post, anyway. A single subject broken into a whole bunch of parts about which I had a lot to say.

Welcome back to the Actually Writing Blog, everybody!

Next step in returning to Normal Life: Roller derby practice! gasp - hack - cough

No, it wasn't quite that bad--I didn't actually have an EIA coughing fit or anything. But, yeah, it turns out my cardio is garbage right now. That could be a covid-recovery thing, but it's more likely to be a two-weeks-off-skates thing. (In general, I really haven't experienced any extra post-covid fatigue or weakness that couldn't be explained by something very normal, like, not exercising for two weeks, or driving all the hell over Boulder County, or not getting enough sleep the night before.)

But I got a lot out of practice nonetheless. It was Scrimmage Thursday. We had scrimmage-shaped drills, where we discussed strategies relevant to particular mid-game scenarios and then ran those scenarios. Between the discussion time and the need to swap out skaters on the track, there were lots of natural opportunities for a skater still rebuilding her endurance to take a break for breathing and hydration.

Our Social Media Maven took lots of photos and video at tonight's practice. Some of those photos are up already on Facebook and Instagram. (To those of y'all coming in from the Facebook rebroadcast of this blog post, I am aware that it's kind of silly to take you from Facebook over to this blog and then back to Facebook for the roller derby photos. But there are worse things in life than Silly.) Check back later for video footage.

...and that's all. (Look, a short post for once!)

Right. Blogging. Wow I'm tired, and it's laaaaaate. But I am trying to get back to this Blogging Every Day thing, so.

As I expected yesterday, today's antigen test came up negative. That makes two tests spaced about 48 hours apart--plus no symptoms for like four days running--which means I'm free to roam about the county. And I did, by golly!

I may have in fact overdone it a little. I feel great, no trouble breathing, no persistent coughing, nothing like that, but... Wow. Tired.

So. What did I do on my first day out and about post-covid? Well...

A bunch of writing! Which, happily, didn't differentiate today from the latter half of my isolation period. As soon as I felt well enough to be upright and do productive things, I did get back into attending one or two co-writing sessions most days, and that resulted in getting a whole bunch of words down on paper and in pixels. Which, if one can swing it (which I can't always, but sometimes I can), is a great comfort and a triumph when one is sick and housebound and demoralized and only able to breathe freely because pseudoephedrine exists.

I mentioned Cat Rambo's writer community yesterday--of all the perks listed there, the co-writing sessions have been what I've found to have the greatest benefit to me personally. They start at particular scheduled times, even the unmoderated ones, and so there is an hour at which I need to be not only in front of my keyboard and working but also in front of my webcam saying hi to other people doing the same. Accountability! It's been very good for me.

(It also resulted in some very nice social time at WorldCon. I got to go have dinner with a co-writing regular one night. Because of all our hours spent together on Zoom, I kept forgetting that this was actually my first time hanging out with her in person.)

So today started at 9 AM with the usual morning co-writing session, and I hit some of my daily tasks there. I managed a bit of another task over lunch, too. And here I am blogging! So I'm feeling pretty virtuous about it all.

I finally had that date with myself at Waffle House, thus fulfilling that weird craving I'd developed during my housebound time. I don't think I've ever had a craving for Waffle House before, not once in my entire life. But something about the combination of this Twitter thread and knowing I wasn't allowed to go created a fierce longing for hashbrowns and coffee. Well, for lunch today, I damn well went to Waffle House #1072, and I had hashbrowns (with sausage and cheese) and coffee. And the waitress was exceedingly friendly and welcoming and complimented me on my facemask bling. And, like I said, I even got a little writing done despite there being neither A/C outlets nor power.

I went to not one but TWO craft group meet-ups. At 11:30 AM there was Casual Crochet in the Park with Andee Graves, an event associated with the Longmont Yarn Shoppe. It will inevitably move back out of the park and into the shop as we move into winter. Not yet, though. The weather today was absolutely gorgeous. Then, at 4:00 PM, there was Wine & Wool Wednesdays at Maverick Fiber Arts in Lafayette. (The "wine" part involves a visit to the bar at the Brewing Market next door. It's not absolutely required. No one will scoff if you get a coffee drink instead. I tend to get this beer.)

I don't think I've ever attended both groups in a single day before, but I was going to do everything, darn it, and see all the people, and work on something like four different projects spread out over three different fiber crafts, and...

Well, no wonder I'm tired. Which is why...

I had a nap! And it was glorious. But then I woke up and realized I hadn't blogged yet, and I wanted to blog, so I figured, let's see if there's just a little more words-on-paper-and-pixels left in me. And there was! Huzzah.

I was going to go on with this blog post and describe all the different knit, crochet, and tatting projects I've got going, but once again, this post is long enough already, so I might as well save it for tomorrow.

You know, at some point, I should make a post that's substantively about actually writing. As opposed to posts like this one, which only mention writing in a glancing sort of way. But, hey, I've got a lot of catching up to do, and there is more in my life, it turns out, than just writing. Hence posts like this one.

(But only a semblance, mind you. Life has been Full of Things, as we shall see here.)

Hello! Hi! Is this thing on? *tap tap tap* It would appear I am blogging again. Yay!

So anyway, what all has happened since June? Well.

I had some technical issues. There was a long, drawn-out oopsie with this website, where suddenly, starting in mid-April, I couldn't log into any private directories, and after lots of frustrating back-and-forth with my domain host's support--I mean, lots, like, MONTHS during which they tried to sell me SSL certificates, they lost track of the issue among all the different support technicians involved in the email chain and had to have it explained again, and failed to even investigate the problem as I reported it--but eventually someone finally did investigate--and it was revealed that my .htaccess files were pointing in the wrong direction. The pathway that was JUST FINE up until that point in mid-April suddenly became invalid. And why was that? Well, it couldn't possibly be because some process or other had deleted the relevant .htpasswd file from where it had lived for decades, could it? No, of course not!

All of which is to say that I'm low-key in search of a new domain host. I'd love it to be a small, woman-owned business, but I know that lightning like DrakNet can't be expected to strike twice. (My current host, a small orange, is the company to which the owner of DrakNet sold the business when she was ready to retire from it.) I'm having trouble even finding alternate webhosts at all--I mean, where webhosts means "the people who store your files on a server so that domain registration can point to it, and give you access to databases and scripting and certain out-of-the-box software you can use if you wish" rather than "someone who'll design your website for you and/or give you a limited template content management system because you don't actually know HTML or CSS, let alone PHP or mySQl."

And then searching for "woman-owned webhosts" on Google was even more fraught. That's how I stumbled upon an intriguing forum thread from 2007 in which answers to same question ranged from "Silly feminist, why do you care about the business owner's gender?" to "Women won't own webhosting companies until webhosting is made simple enough for their ladybrains to understand." In the 21st century, y'all. I guess this is the techbro version of "women don't write hard science fiction because they can't hack the science, lol."

Anyway. Anyone know anything about Earth Girl LLC?

I went to WorldCon! Incidentally, this involved taking my very first train trip since 2020. Amtrak has long since stopped requiring masks on board, more's the pity, but I traveled in sleeper so I could close the door on my own private roommette, and I had my meals brought to me in my roommette, and I wore a mask every time I left my roommette, so I felt pretty well protected.

WorldCon was in Chicago, where the sister of an online acquaintance of mine has a condo up the north end of the Magnificent Mile, and so the two of us stayed there without charge, which was really nice. It did mean a commute of a little under a mile between our lodgings and the convention, but whatever, that's why I brought my skates. I did a lot of skating in Chicago, not only to and from the Hyatt Regency but also up and down the Lakefront and the Riverwalk. It was great!

And it appears that, after all this time, I've finally reached that point in my con-going where I cobble together my schedule based less on what panels I want to see and more on the people I'd like to hang out with. Oh, I went to panels, sure, and a poetry workshop, and a craft circle too. And I did throw my name in the lottery for Table Talks with Big Names in the Industry. But more often I signed up for a Table Talk because "Hey, I know that person from Codex or Viable Paradise or from Cat Rambo's online community. It would be nice to spend some time chatting with them." And that was lovely.

This was my first time attending WorldCon since 2011, when it was in Reno. Turns out I still very much enjoy the experience and hope to do it again in two years when WorldCon goes to Glasgow. I also very much still enjoy taking the train--and I'll be doing that again Very Soon Now, because...

I'm going to World Fantasy in New Orleans! Got my attending membership some months ago. Finally got my hotel room yesterday. Today I had a chat with Dad about logistics for family-and-friends visiting before the con, and later today or maybe tomorrow I'll wrangle my Amtrak dates.

The idea behind visiting Dad and them before the con is so that I don't expose any high-risk loved ones to whatever I might have chanced to pick up during the con. World Fantasy has posted the same COVID-19 policy as WorldCon did--which is to say, must be vaccinated to attend, must wear masks properly at all times--but risk remains, so might as well be smart about this.

I'm very much looking forward to a convention in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to Halloween costumes and people-watching and good food. I'm looking forward to skating around the French Quarter! I'm looking forward to visiting the Royal Street Rouses to equip myself with snacks and beer. I'm looking forward to wandering between convention programming items with a bottle of Abita in my hand, because it's Louisiana, suckers. Although I suppose with public masking required I may have to plan my beers with somewhat more precision than I did during World Horror 2013.

Anyways, that's coming up, and I'm stoked.

I skated a whole heck of a lot of roller derby! We had our season closing event on September 17, pretty much right after I got back from WorldCon. We set up the venue Friday night and on Saturday there were three (3) bouts, two of which I personally skated in. I was sooooooore afterward, but very happy.

In the intraleague mixer, my team won by three points. That's a seriously close game! There was a point midway through the second half where it was tied at 150, and I had to bite my tongue because most of my teammates would prefer not to know the score actually, and I prefer to respect my teammates' needs for preserving their Game Mentality. (This is a subtweet.) But I did sidle over to one teammate I knew did like to know the score, to whisper "Eeeeeee it's tied it's tied it's tied!!!!" and she went "Eeeeeee!" back.

Eeeeeeee!

The last game of the night was us versus Denver's C team, who beat us authoritatively but told us at the afterparty that we'd made them work hard for it. We were pretty proud of the score we put up against them.

So. Turns out, that was my last roller derby experience to date, because right after that event...

I caught COVID. Alas! My two-and-a-half year record for avoiding the plague came to an end when I tested positive on September 22. I'm fairly certain of the how, when, and from whom of contracting the virus, but all I'll say here is that it was most likely not directly from skating on the 17th, but rather from a social outing later that weekend.

Obviously I hold no grudge whatsoever against the person I got it from. They didn't know they had it until two days after they passed it on to me, and I didn't know I had it until I'd had plenty of time to pass it on to John. Once I knew, I tried to isolate, but that was probably a futile endeavor from the start. He tested positive a couple days after I did.

We'd both just gotten the new booster, like, less than a week before we got the virus. So aside from not having the benefit of a full two weeks post-shot, we were fairly well protected. That's probably why our symptoms were no worse than those consistent with a really obnoxious cold. But I had that dreaded rebound--return of symptoms plus new positive test--that turned my Day 7 into a new Day Zero, so I'm only on the exit ramp now.

But I am on it. I will say that with certainty. It's Day 7 again, I've gone three days with no symptoms at all, and I tested negative yesterday. Hoping for another negative test tomorrow morning, and feeling pretty confident I'll be able to leave the house and go among the nice people again Real Soon Now. With a mask on, of course.

(Maybe then the dreams about "What am I doing out among people when I'm contagious? And why aren't I wearing a mask?!" will taper off. Because yeah, I got those. Multiple times. Thanks, brain.)

And those are the highlights. There's probably more, but this is a long enough post already, and I might as well save some for tomorrow. Because I am going to try to blog again tomorrow. And the day after that. So do please stand by.

So I've got TWO things I would like to share with you, one on a semi-urgent RIGHT NOW basis, and that first and most urgent THING is as follows:

This afternoon! At the Boulder County Fairgrounds! We got ROLLER DERBY! Doors at 5, first whistle at 6 to start the Juniors bout, and then we got Boulder County versus North Texas starting around 7:30 PM. That's U.S. Mountain Time (UTC-6), and the reason I'm bothering telling you so is, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of our media maven Rickashananay, we are livestreaming via Twitch! Which means I get to invite you, out-of-town friend or fan or acquaintance (you know who you are), to be in the virtual audience and watch us skate from the comfort of your own computer or smartphone or other internet-enabled device.

Here's that link: https://www.twitch.tv/bouldercountyrollerderby

Of course, if you're reading this from somewhere in central Colorado, you should get the heck over here in person because roller derby is always better that way. Tickets will be available at the door all afternoon long. That's the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, Colorado, on Hover Street between Nelson Road and Boston Avenue, in the Exhibit Building--just follow the signs.

I'm really excited about this because it'll be our first time hosting a visiting league, and our first time playing a league from outside of Colorado, since 2019. It's true! You know why. And for that reason, we'll be skating in masks to protect ourselves and our opponents, because it's a thing.

And the reason I'm really hype about it all right now this second is, I'm DONE with my part of venue set up. Because I happen to know how to do it, I get the bout-day responsibility of making sure we have a track. I head up a team of three or four people in taping the track boundaries, jammer and pivot lines, 10-foot marks, outside referee lanes, penalty box boundaries, and any other associated marks. Well, today my team was ON POINT and we were done in less than two hours, and now all I have to do... is look forward to playing the game I love. I am an exceedingly happy skater right now!

(Also I am stuffing my face with pho. That's my pregame ritual and you can't take it away from me.)

So that's the urgent-right-now bit of news. The other bit of news is this: The Summer Solstice 2022 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer is out, and with it, my brand new poem, "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland". Do check it out!

Good afternoon! Yesterday's episode of Story Hour went very well. I'm pretty sure I only mispronounced two words, maybe three. I read my short story "Survival, After," which wound up pairing very well with Brian Hugenbruch's heartwarming "An Elicitation of Thursdays" in that both stories just pile on the weirdness paragraph by paragraph until you just give up and say, "OK, fine, jerky is nocturnal and puke can have great handwriting, whatever, everything about this is perfectly normal."

If you missed it, never fear, the recording will live on for as long as Facebook endures, and you don't need a login to watch it.

So. Thing the really Second. Referring to two Things of great potential stress I had accomplished on a day in late March. One of them was getting my laptop ready to ship for repairs. The other thing was this:

I had finally decided it was time I stepped away from my volunteer gig with the Audio Information Network of Colorado.

I had been reading for them since... oh, I forget. A good few years before they changed their name from Radio Reading Service of the Rockies to what it is now. A few years yet before I quit my day job with Wall Street On Demand. So... 2002? 2003? A good long while, in any case. Long enough that, as much as I still believed in and supported their mission, the only reason I was still doing it was because I had been doing it so long. Twenty-years-ago-me had decided to do it, and present-day-me hadn't really reevaluated that decision.

It was time to move on. With fondness and some regret, I emailed my resignation... and gave some thought to where present-day-me might like to spend those eight-to-ten hours a week.

First off, the easy answer: More writing! I'm not going to tell anyone else that they should write every day, but, notwithstanding my recent rant about YES WRITERS GET WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS OFF DAMMIT, it turns out I really shouldn't. If I don't write every day, it messes me up. I lose my rhythm. If I take the weekend off, I tend to lose Monday too, just trying to get back into the swing of things, and then Thursday comes too soon--so much for a productive week!

So maybe I don't want to take Fridays and Sundays off. Maybe I can use those newly freed-up morning hours for at least an abbreviated version of my Morning Shift.

And. Well. Have I? Um. Sometimes. New habits are hard, y'all. But more often than not, yes, yes I have, and it's a good thing.

Secondly, there's something else I've been meaning to do for a very long time. Something else at the crossroads of "volunteer" and "read aloud." And that something is LibreVox.

Turns out, I like reading aloud, but I want to focus on narrating fiction, both for my own enjoyment and to strengthen my resume in this regard. So about ten years ago, I formed the intention of volunteering for LibreVox. I even made a post on their forum introducing myself and everything. And then, what with one thing and another, the years went by. I never even recorded a one-minute test file, which is the very first step volunteers are supposed to take.

So I guess now I stand a better chance of finding time to do that. Good luck me!

Next time: Hell, I don't know. Probably some whining about how writing new poetry is hard. Because it is. Stay tuned.