author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This is the first weekend featuring the recent changes to the blockade schedule. It's probably too early to tell what effect these changes are having on the blockade scene, but I can tell you this much: Over on the Meridian Ocean, everybody and their gunpuppy is attacking Cream Pie. I don't know if this is because CP are known to be asleep around noon Pirate Time, or because there's some sort of oceanwide grudge against that flag--no one's talking about it on the forums that I can see. But these are all high-paying blockades; I was seeing jobbing offers ranging from 5K to 75 PoE/seg. If you're looking to replenish your doubloon supply, Meridian Ocean looks to be the place.

None of the other oceans are quite as blockade-infatuated today as the Meridian Ocean, but there's something to do everywhere except for Jade. (The Jade Ocean is saving its energy for next week, when Azarbad attacks Spaniel.) On Cerulean, Cold Steel is defending Guava Island from Madame Yu Jian; in a recruitment effort for this they have produced some of the most fantastic intent art I have ever seen. Opal's hosting a scuffle between Strawhats and that ocean's own version of Azarbad the Great over Doyle-Insel. And Emerald Ocean features four blockades, one of them a midnight defense against Admiral Finius and his 19-strong fleet.

Nineteen! I could be wrong, though. I had a very hard time counting those little red shippies on the blockade schedule, so many they were and so crowded close together. I had to move my little mouse cursor over the little red shippies and tell people not to talk to me while I counted.

You know what to do--get out there, get jobbed, puzzle hard, have fun. If you need me, I'll be on the Meridian Ocean. I mean, writing. I'm totally going to be writing. (On the Meridian Ocean.)

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

Doubloon Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, November 7 ***

10:08 a.m. - Doyle-Insel, Opal Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Das alles verzehrende Feuer (1)
Attacker: Strawhats

12:00 p.m. - Tigerleaf Mountain, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Imperial Coalition

12:00 p.m. - Terra Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Coming Soon

12:00 p.m. - Hadrian Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Barely Dressed
Attacker: Blood Sweat and Beers

12:00 p.m. - Fintan Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Radioactive

12:00 p.m. - Kirin Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Coming Soon
Undeclared: Heaven's Army

12:00 p.m. - Napi Peak, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Imperial Coalition

1:00 p.m. - Dendrite Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Radioactive
Attacker: Cannabis Nation

2:00 p.m. - Prolix Purlieu, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Velt's Boiyz
Attacker: The Enlightened (13)

4:00 p.m. - Basset Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Midknight Sun
Attacker: The All-Consuming Flame (6)

5:00 p.m. - Arakoua Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: The Crazy Department
Attacker: Cunning Stunts

5:29 p.m. - Labyrinth Moors, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Chthonic Horde (4)
Attacker: The Secret Service

7:32 p.m. - Surtsey Island, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Black Veil (2)
Attacker: Per Angusta Ad Augusta
Attacker: Licence to Kill

10:31 p.m. - Kakraphoon Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: The Crazy Department
Attacker: Cunning Stunts

*** Sunday, November 8 ***

12:00 a.m. - Admiral Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Gunslingers
Attacker: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (19)

Subscription Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, November 7 ***

12:00 p.m. - Guava Island, Cerulean Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Cold Steel
Attacker: The Jade Empire (4)

First things first. Today is a first Friday; you get a Fictionette. "In the Shadow of Next Tuesday" is its title. It's kind of fun and silly, and it's also kind of bittersweet. And I totally want to pet the stilt-o-dile.

In other Fictionette news, the Fictionette Freebie for October 2015 turned out to be "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon". Turned out--I say that like it just happened, all on its ownsome, like I didn't have a vote. OK. I decided to go with the Friday Fictionette for October 2. In any case, the complete text is now available to one and all as a slick little PDF you can print or just load up in your favorite reader, and as a bite-sized MP3 of me reading the fictionette to you as a bedtime story or during rush hour traffic.

So that's your Fictionette news. Now, about that National Novel Writing Month...

So last year I abstained for the first time in more than a decade. I'd just retired from precisely a decade of being Boulder's NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison, and I had a short story revision I was excited to work on, and, well, "because it would be a shame to break my twelve-year streak" seemed insufficient reason to stress myself out. So I took last year off. Well, this year I finally got that short story revision done, and I decided I'd do NaNoWriMo to celebrate that. Yay, a whole month of nothing but glorious fun wild delirious discovery draft! A whole month during which two hours of each writing day may be spent exploring a brand new story and holding myself to absolutely no standards of quality!

Well, today's Day 6 and I haven't logged a single word yet.

Drat.

It's OK, though! I had already planned on... let's see, 50K divided by 16 workdays in November... I'd already planned on writing 3,125 words per session; I just have to work some of those sessions on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. Which is fine. I'll be meeting an old NaNoWriMo friend (who is also now a roller derby friend--the Venn diagram overlap of my writing circle and my derby circle is of surprisingly significant size) for a late lunch and writing date tomorrow, so even if I get nothing logged tonight I'll be off to a great start this weekend.

It will all be just fine.

Despite an original cunning plan to spend the last days of October in productive plot-brainstorming mode, I never quite figured out what I was going to write. Then on November 1 my freewriting session resulted in a sort of cross between Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven (dreams that rewrite the world) and the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" (if you don't keep the godlet happy, he'll send you to the cornfield). I am mildly concerned that this idea will last me for roughly 5,000 words before dumping me in the proverbial cornfield. But that's the risk one takes. If I have to describe the protagonist's breakfast like it was Dónal and Mórag's wedding feast, then I will do that. That is, after all, how NaNoWriMo goes. Like the founder of the annual shindig says, No Plot? No Problem!

Hi. Hello. So... didn't really get back into gear so smoothly after giving myself a Halloween holiday. Took a while to get the engines running. I think maybe taking time off so soon after starting a new routine might be contraindicated when fomenting new habits. Not that it would have been better to try to not take time off, not with everything else that was going on. But I suspect that time off didn't help.

Also, one of our skaters broke her leg Monday night during our scrimmage in Fort Collins. This is a thing that occasionally happens when you play a full-contact sport on skates. We prepare for it as best we can, and then we try not to think about it. We try to play like it's not even in the realm of possibility. And then, once in a while, it happens, and it sucks.

Pretty much everyone in the league who was at that scrimmage had a pretty shitty night after that. Not, of course, nearly as shitty as what the injured skater herself endured. But the league immediately began doing everything in its collective power to make things less shitty for her, from hospital visits to errand-running to plans for bringing her food to just plain sending all our love via the internet and phone and telepathy. That's what roller derby leagues do. It's kind of amazing.

So priorities changed, and the next few days got a little redirected. And that's life.

Today was a fairly solid writing day, if a little weird. I had a ticket to see the live Welcome to Night Vale show at the Paramount. So I took off by bus around midday for Denver with plans to work on my various writing tasks from maybe Leela European Cafe until showtime. And then I remembered that Union Station got significantly upgraded, and is no longer this cavernous hall with bad acoustics and tall penitent pews and an aura of despair. Instead, it is now a fancy hotel and a small shopping mall and a restaurant district. So I splurged a bit at Stoic & Genuine (well, kind of more than a bit) and then settled down at one of the lobby device-charging tables to plug in my laptop and make words happen on it. And words did happen.

The Welcome to Night Vale live show was amazing. Go see it if you can.

I'm writing this blog post on the bus back to Boulder. John will meet me at the station and drive me home, where I will have a bite to eat and then commence whatever the heck I wind up writing for NaNoWriMo.

Have I mentioned that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year? Well, I am.

About that, more later.

As was announced last week, there will be a couple changes to the way blockades are scheduled. Starting November 6...

• The blockade drop window will be Friday noon to midnight Pirate Time. Blockades will all happen between noon and midnight on Saturday. (This will also shorten the window for Brigand King blockade times.)
• All breaks will now be 15 minutes, removing the long break between rounds 3 and 4.

Now, the Opal Ocean has always run on a slightly different schedule; you've probably noticed that blockades on the German-language ocean often start many hours before noon on Saturday. Accordingly, Opal's new blockade schedule will be different from that of the English-language oceans:

On the Opal Ocean, the new time frame for declaring blockades will be Friday 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM (11:00 - 23:00) German time. The start time of the blockades will correspondingly be Saturdays from 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM. Again, this applies also to Brigand Kings.

This translation brought to you by Google Translate and my own copyediting skills. And according to timeanddate.com, when it's 11:00 AM in Germany it's 2:00 AM by Pirate Time/U.S. Pacific Time.

Speaking of time zones and schedules, U.S. Daylight Savings Time ends this week. In most U.S. locations, we set our clocks back an hour. The Pacific Time zone is no exception. Any blockades with start times later than 2:00 AM PT on Sunday, Nov. 1 may be represented inaccurately below--I still haven't figured out how to fix that for sure. I'll try to double-check the schedule sometime early after the time shift tomorrow morning and correct whatever needs correcting.

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

Doubloon Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, October 31 ***

3:00 a.m. - Doyle-Insel, Opal Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Der Zorn der Götter
Attacker: Das alles verzehrende Feuer (1)

9:50 a.m. - McGuffins Insel, Opal Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Chthonische Horden (1)
Attacker: Strawhats

11:05 a.m. - Tumult-Insel, Opal Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Hort des Eiswurms (1)
Attacker: Strawhats

1:42 p.m. - Windward Vale, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Alria
Attacker: Coming Soon

2:00 p.m. - Raven's Roost, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Legacy of Life
Attacker: Corteezism

7:43 p.m. - Surtsey Island, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Black Veil (3)
Attacker: Trap House

*** Sunday, November 1 ***

6:51 a.m. - Marlowe Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (4)
Attacker: Coming In Hot

9:00 a.m. - Ambush Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Midknight Sun
Attacker: The Jade Empire (4)

11:00 a.m. - Arakoua Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: The Crazy Department
Attacker: The Jade Empire (7)

11:58 a.m. - Ventress Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Gunslingers
Attacker: Hysteria

11:58 a.m. - Wissahickon Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: This Means War
Attacker: Naughtiest Naughtiness

12:00 p.m. - Labyrinth Moors, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Cream Pie
Attacker: Chthonic Horde (5)

12:00 p.m. - Doyle Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: This Means War
Attacker: Naughtiest Naughtiness
Attacker: Truth or Dare

12:00 p.m. - Bowditch Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Loose Lips Sink Ships
Attacker: Qlimax Telecom

12:00 p.m. - Alkaid Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: This Means War
Attacker: Qlimax Telecom

Subscription Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, October 31 ***

12:00 p.m. - Labyrinth Moors, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Mixed Nuts
Attacker: Babylon

1:00 p.m. - Turtle Island, Cerulean Ocean
Event: 7 rounds, nonsinking & no removal
Hosted by: Babylon

3:00 p.m. - Kirin Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Totalitarian principle
Attacker: Babylon

3:15 p.m. - Remora Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: The Phoenix Rises
Attacker: Undertow

6:00 p.m. - Islay of Luthien, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Tyr's Own
Attacker: Babylon

8:00 p.m. - Lagniappe Island, Cerulean Ocean
Event: 1 round, sinking!
Hosted by: Tequila Sunrise

9:00 p.m. - Cormorant Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Super Awesomeness
Attacker: Babylon

*** Sunday, November 1 ***

12:00 a.m. - Hephaestus' Forge, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Midnight Yacht Club
Attacker: Babylon

3:00 a.m. - Cochineal Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Static Before the Storm
Attacker: Babylon

6:00 a.m. - Cnossos Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: The Phoenix Rises
Attacker: Riding High

12:00 p.m. - Xi Island, Cerulean Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Crimson Tide
Attacker: Ice Wyrm's Brood (4)

Behold! Two short stories went winging to their respective targets. Two of them! And all my writing for the day, except for this blog post, done before five pee-em. Folks, I am on fire.

John very kindly allowed me to read "Caroline's Wake" to him, which, given its length, meant the donation of more than half an hour plus some engaged discussion. He is a fantastic writer-support spouse. All the kudos. It was his first time experiencing this particular story, so he was able to offer a fresh perspective on whether it made sense, whether the characters were acting like real people, and whether things the right emotional weight was present. These are all things I worry about when a lot of slicing and dicing goes on between drafts. While "killing your darlings" it's possible to also kill some hard-working support structures. When vital pillars and buttresses go missing, it helps to have someone around to notice.

Speaking of killing your darlings, he also suggested I cut the final paragraph. The one about the crocus heralding a mild winter. Dammit. OK. I cut it, because the requesting editor said the exact same thing (or at the very least she suggested that it shouldn't be the final paragraph) and when two separate readers notice the same problem then maybe it's a good idea to listen to them. Dammit.

(Some darlings are very darling. Alas.)

Anyway, the story went into the email, and very soon afterward I had a reply full of excitement and glee, which was a relief. I'd secretly feared, because I am prone to Writer's Weasel Brain, that she'd be all what, this old thing? Not interested anymore. You missed your chance. But of course that was not the case. Weasel Brain is always wrong. Two reliable things about Weasel Brain: It'll always have something to say, and it'll always be wrong.

As expected, the title of the submission to Alien Artifacts got changed. When that story went to The First Line, it was called "The Rapture of the Santiago Women", as a nod to the famous Roman abduction event known as the Rape of the Sabine Women". Problem was, the allusion really only was skin deep. It was clever but not resonant. So I changed it to "Comin' For to Carry Me Home" both for the literal meaning within the plot and the play on homing device.

(And now you have the song stuck in your head, and my work here is done.)

Also, the first line got changed, as its original first line is best considered the exclusive property of The First Line. Which mean the little boy's name had to be changed, since it had been part of the first line. And then a whole bunch of other stuff got changed until, given that the story's only about 1300 words long, the revision really merited a whole new version number under my private and terribly subjective file-naming system. So Alien Artifacts gets to see Homing Device v2.0, or maybe, given the last print-out and line-edit pass, v2.2.1

Fair warning: I may just take the rest of the week off. Friday is fifth Friday, which means no Friday Fictionette is due. And tomorrow is a Halloween party on skates, which means I have to put the finishing touches on my costume. (John has been helping me with that, too. All the kudos.) So if I get very little done for the rest of the week, it's OK. I done a whole thunder of stuff between last week and now. I can take a small holiday.

I put in two solid hours on the story revision today, and it is almost done. Tantalizingly close. I hope to submit it tomorrow, at which point I shall crow mightly.

I'd like to write a little about the process of turning one draft into another draft. You might not be interested. You might be all, "Feh! I have my own process. I do not need yours. Feh, I say!" in which case you can skip this bit and scroll down to the next bit. But if you're interested, here's my process. Or at least, here's the process I used for this story and for this draft.

To start with, I had a critiqued copy of the previous draft to work from. The response to its submission last year was to invite me to resubmit if I could get it down to between 4,000 and 5,000 words. So I wrote back, tentatively asking if the editor had any thoughts she'd like to share to guide me in that revision; the editor responded with a line-by-line critique, crossing out text that was slowing down the story and highlighting elements that should be foregrounded.

This, by the way, is the sort of unlooked-for gift that writers dream of getting. We get excited just to get a rejection letter with personal comments, so you can imagine the ecstasy occasioned by an unasked for critique and line edit. Accompanying an invitation to resubmit, no less.

So my first step was to import this critique into my Scrivener project. I moved the August 2014 draft out of the Draft folder (where the documents to compile into a manuscript live) and into my custom Previous Drafts folder, to keep a record and to make room. Then I imported the critique, which was handily in RTF already, into a custom Critiques folder. I converted all of the editor's notes and deletions into linked notes. I also inspected the recommended deletions for any content I didn't want to lose, noted those elements, and considered how I might incorporate them into the surviving text.

Next, I began to type up a new draft from blank, using the critiqued copy and my notes as a reference. This is what took me for-frickin'-ever. This is the part of the process where I kept abandoning it for weeks and then needing to reacquaint myself with the project whenever I tried to pick it up again. I was about a third of the way through this step when I finally got my act together last week.

Thursday night I began the next stage of the revision: print it out and scribble on it (line-edit). I had the foolish idea this would take me, oh, maybe an hour. WRONG! This took the remainder of Thursday and all of Friday too. Lots of crossing things out and attempting to rephrase things. Embarrassing typos to be hunted down and destroyed.

Today I picked up that scribbled-on copy and began to implement the line-edit. I scanned through the printed document for scribbles, and I typed into the new draft whatever the scribbles said. Sounds simple, right? Generally it was. But there were a few "bugs" that were more complex; those I put aside for later, creating a linked note for each to make coming back to them easier.

When the simple fixes were done, I went back to those linked notes, which live in Scrivener's Inspector pane under the Comments and Footnotes tab, and began addressing the more complex line-edits. There were four of them. I got through two before my time was up today.

That's it. Tomorrow I hope to address the last two "bugs" on my buglist, and submit the revision that was requested more than a year ago. I continue to feel silly about taking fourteen months to get this done, but the bad-ass joy of getting it done at last rather outweighs that embarrassment.

Also, as I upload this post to my blog, I will be finished with my work day. All finished. By five o'clock in the afternoon. I honestly can't remember the last time I managed that. It will feel so very good to gear up for roller derby practice in the certain, satisfied knowledge that no work awaits me when I come home. Again, I'm embarrassed that it's taken me until now to find my workday rhythm, but I'm too pleased with having found it to notice the embarrassment overmuch.

Oh! Also, today's submission procedures involved preparing "The Rapture of the Santiago Women," whose title I might yet change, for submission to the forthcoming Alien Artifacts anthology from Zombies Need Brains LLC. I will most definitely change the first line, as it was dictated by the market I sent it to first. I've already edited the story a bit today, just cleaning up the text to make it flow more smoothly. A story's always a little rough when I write it to a themed issue's deadline; I like to make sure it's a bit more polished before it heads out to meet the next slush pile.

This is another thing that feels awesome--as the revision on "Caroline's Wake" comes to a close, I've got brain-space for revising other stories for resubmission. It's like I'd been in jail for a year, but with the means to make the key to the prison door. What the eff took me so long to do it? Damn. Well, door's open now. Free!

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!

It's a friendly weekend in the blockade scene.

On the Cerulean Ocean, Babylon invites Super Awesomeness to tussle over Cormorant Island because "they haven't had some PvP fun in a long time." Isn't that nice? It's very considerate. Also, they'll be using an entertaining selection of ships, and there will be a Halloween-themed raffle.

And on the Meridian Ocean, Legacy of Life hopes that a noon-time drop on Harmattan will fit the busy schedule of Imperial Coalition better than that of their previous drop on Raven's Roost. IC have graciously accepted their invitation to "a fun and relaxed cade." I like seeing flags play nice.

I'm only being a little sarcastic here: I'm used to seeing flag royalty at each others' throats on the forum, so, really, how long can this last? But flag drama is very much not why I love playing Puzzle Pirates. YPP is one of the cutest and friendliest MMORGs out there, and when people getting into serious snits at each other over it, it makes me uncomfortable. So: Yay friendliness!

All I'm seeing in Emerald Ocean Parley is a bit of a kerfuffle over messages left on Aimuarie housing news boxes. This is decidedly not friendly, nor is it really blockade related. What you want to know is that Brigand Kings are attacking Tumult and Marlowe today at noon PT, and Barbary tomorrow at noon. Also, tonight Illuminati and Hysteria will battle over possession of Pukru. There, isn't that much more useful then knowing who accused whom of leaving what message at Jonestown Houses?

I may or may not find time to job in blockades today, what with being at Mile Hi Con and all. So y'all will have to get out and have twice as much fun as usual--some for me as well as some for you. Thankee kindly!

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

Doubloon Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, October 24 ***

10:47 a.m. - Maia-Insel, Opal Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Der Fluch (1)
Attacker: Glare

12:00 p.m. - Marlowe Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: No Offence Intended
Attacker: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (4)

12:00 p.m. - Harmattan Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Imperial Coalition
Attacker: Legacy of Life

12:00 p.m. - Tumult Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: The Explorers Guild
Attacker: The Enlightened (4)

12:00 p.m. - Ansel Island, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Alria
Attacker: The Jade Empire (7)

12:58 p.m. - Edgars Wahl, Opal Ocean
Defender: Der Zorn der Götter
Attacker: Strawhats

8:14 p.m. - Surtsey Island, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Black Veil (5)
Attacker: The Secret Service

9:00 p.m. - Pukru Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Illuminatti
Attacker: Hysteria

*** Sunday, October 25 ***

12:00 p.m. - Barbary Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Midknight Sun
Attacker: The Jade Empire (8)

Subscription Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, October 24 ***

12:14 p.m. - Cormorant Island, Cerulean Ocean
Defender: Super Awesomeness
Attacker: Babylon

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!

I have here, in my hot little hands, a brand new printed-out draft of "Caroline's Wake." It's about 1500 words shorter than the version I submitted last year, and, I very much hope, a stronger story. It's not quite ready to submit at this time, but give me a couple more hours to scribble in between the double-spaced lines of the print-out, and it will be.

Today is Day 3 of Actually Getting Writing Done on a Reliable, Workerlike Basis. Seriously, this week has been fantastic. I've been getting my morning shift done in the morning, and I've been using my afternoon shift to create publishable story copy. It is amazing how awesome it feels to transform writing from a guilt-inducing monster into a life-affirming achievement.

I'm not entirely sure what made this sort of productivity and dailiness feel convincingly possible this week and not, say, last week, or last year, or eleven and a half years ago when I quit my day job. But I can point to a few things that could be said to have helped.

Dropped all expectations of content writing. I got cut from first one Examiner gig and then the other, and I decided I was ready to let them go rather than fight to get them back. Examiner only paid according to some secret metric of eyeballs-on-page, which came to about $20 every third month. I was doing it because it was an outlet for babbling about stuff that interested me, not because it paid well. Which was sily, because I already have an outlet for babbling, and that's this blog here.

But this change also occasioned me reevaluating the desirability of having a content writing gig at all. Content writing obviously cuts into my writing time and capacity. Every writing hour spent on Examiner or Textbroker is an hour I'm not thinking up and writing down stories. And while a good content writing gig can be a reliable source of funds, the fact is I'm fortunate enough to have a well-paid spouse who enthusiastically supports my career goals. I can afford to take not just my writing but my fiction full-time.

And if I put all my writing hours toward writing, revising, and submitting short stories, I'm likely to actually sell a few. It's a better use of my time all around.

Which is not to say that I won't be tempted by a decent content writing gig. I did just submit a sample of my writing to a respectable organization that's looking to build a stable of web writers and editors. If that goes somewhere, well, I'll figure out how to schedule it in at that time.

Rearranged my timesheet template. I log my writing on a spreadsheet every day. That's how I know when I've done my five hours. This week I totally revamped the daily template, and it's ridiculous how much this helped. I suppose a well-organized brain is a productive brain.

I used to have my spreadsheet separated out into categories of types of writing: fiction in this block (short story, novel, freewriting), content writing in that block (Examiner, textbroker, other), miscellaneous over thataways (Friday Fictionettes, etc.). Then, if I was feeling decisive, I'd babble out a sort of schedule for the day in a column off to the right, which I might or might not look at again all day.

This week I overhauled it such that the schedule was baked right into the timesheet. Everything I expect myself to do in a work day, it's there, and in order. All the nonsense and clutter is gone. It's just Morning Pages, the Morning Shift block, the Afternoon Shift block, the actually writing blog, done. If I want to be more precise, there's room to type a description--for instance, "Short Fiction" today is described as "finish 'Caroline's Wake' to printable draft" for the first hour and "take your pen and finalize that draft!" for the second. But for the most part, my plan is just to do the next thing until I come to the end of the things.

There's still a line for content writing in the Afternoon Shift block, but mostly it just gets crossed off.

Began enforcing scheduling constraints. Before, I would get lost somewhere between Morning Pages and freewriting, or between freewriting and fictionette, and I might never come back from my long break in order to start the afternoon shift. Having reorganized my timesheet, I can now use it to determine where I break and for how long. Basically, if I'm in the middle of a block, I keep working Pomodoro style until I'm done with that block: 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. If I get to white space, I can take a longer break for a meal or for playtime, but I have to have a concrete idea of when I'll start the next block. When that time comes around, I absolutely must get back to work.

This is not rocket science. This is what I always should have done, and what I've always known I ought to do. Somehow, this week I'm actually doing it. Amazing. I'm going to attribute it in part to the overhauled timesheet, and in another part to something else:

Reevaluated how I spend my break time. I hate to admit it, but I can't actually fit an hour of Puzzle Pirates into a 5-minute break. I can't even fit an hour of Puzzle Pirates into an hour. It's like football that way. Or roller derby. The clock may say that an hour of game time passed, but it took a lot more than one hour of real time.

But I can log onto Puzzle Pirates, play a single round of the Distilling puzzle, and log off. That takes about five minutes. Or I can play Two Dots until the Pomodoro Timer's end-of-break whistle.

The weird thing is, these little self-contained puzzle games are starting to act like both a reward and a trigger. That is, they not only function as "Yay, you worked 25 minutes straight, you get a cookie," but also as this Pavlovian signal that it's time to get back to work. Finishing a "pom" means I get to play a puzzle. Finishing a puzzle means it's time to get back to work.

So, these are things that have helped. (Also, getting up early--I keep aiming for 8:00, but as long as I'm up by 9:00 I stand a strong chance of finishing my morning shift by noon.) But what also helped was simply knowing that it's been more than a year since the rewrite on "Caroline's Wake" was requested, and that's just ridiculous, and the ridiculous shit ends now. And so it does.