author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I should probably do the November 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up, because next week I'll be doing the one for December. YES! I will be all caught up next week! Only about a month later than I originally planned, but hey.

November 5: "On Lightning Plain" (ebook, audio) In which we defy the gods. "Ah, go easy. New in these parts. No clue about the weather hereabouts."

November 12: "An Emerging Talent" (ebook, audio) In which a late-blooming sorcerer finds her magic at last and makes an enemy for life. "But if I show that I have sorcery of my own, doesn't that change things?"

November 19: "The Cursed Mascot" (ebook, audio) In which we scale up. Lost every game since you bought the ugly thing? Maybe you should review your training curriculum.

November 26: "In Memoriam" (ebook, audio) In which we make everyone perfectly safe. But her husband didn't want to hear about it. One didn't talk about magic in polite company.

The Fictionette Freebie for November 2021 is "The Cursed Mascot," which is preachy as hell but I don't care, it was a lot of fun to write. Go ahead and download that sucker if you wanna; it is now an unlocked post, so you don't need to subscribe at any tier to access it.

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. How was yours? I hope like heck it did not involve RAGING WILDFIRES. Because I have it on good authority that those suck.

(In case you were wondering and/or were worried, John and I are fine. We're a few miles north of the areas that were evacuated for the Marshall Fire, so our home was never in any concrete danger. THIS TIME. It had been so dry this winter, with very little measurable snowfall right up to the end of the year, that any spark could ignite the next catastrophe. We were fortunate to be spared this time around. We are also extremely aware that fortune today doesn't guarantee fortune tomorrow. It's kinda sobering to think about.)

I have a bunch of things to blog about over the next few days. Today I think I'm going to blog about New Year's Non-Resolutions.

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. They strike me mostly as an opportunity to set myself up to fail. So much of the tradition seems to involve enumerating all the ways I suck, scolding myself for them, and attempting to be a person who sucks less. This is perhaps an ungenerous way of looking at the New Year's Resolution tradition. It is nevertheless representative of the tradition's historical role in my life.

But I do have some small changes to make to my day-to-day routine and to my self-expectations that, I hope, will make me, if not a less sucky person, then a happier person, someone who approaches the daily work without so much dread and self-recrimination.

I'm making some small changes to my schedule. I'll be expecting less from myself on those days when I know I'll have less to give. I'll be reserving more time for those goals that have gotten shortchanged in that respect of late. And I'll be reevaluating my relationship with writing with a focus on why I write.

This blog post by Chuck Wendig brought that into sharp relief for me: "Writer's Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy"

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it's easy to lose a hold on that reason.

It's been a good long while since I read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, but one of the bits that stands out fresh and sharp in my memory is the image of the author leaping out of bed in his eagerness to start the day's writing. And wow do I envy that. It's more common for me to wake up in a state of dread, knowing that all those things I blithely planned the day before have now come due, and I'm not ready. I'm just not ready.

I've often blogged about, complained about, lamented and griped about, my constant struggle with avoidance--with the difficulty of simply sitting down and getting started. And I have several strategies that can help with that, depending on the day. Co-writing sessions and their pressure to be punctual and productive. The "I'll just" method of replacing the Big Scary Task with a smaller, less threatening task ("Instead of revising the story, I'll just open the file and reread the current draft."). Letting external and internal deadlines convince me that I gotta do the thing regardless of whether I wanna.

But I wanna wanna. That's the whole point. Strategies for convincing myself to do the thing that I don't wanna do, they all sort of ignore that the whole root of the problem is that very don't wanna in the first place.

Instead of looking forward to writing, I'm dreading it. What a sad place for one's lifetime ambition to live!

I would like 2022 to be the year of remembering, in specific and sensory detail, all the reasons why I originally decided to be a writer. Why I wanted to write. Why making up stories and playing with words made me excited and happy. I'd like to recognize the moments when I do genuinely look forward to writing, and pay attention to how that feels, and why I'm feeling it, and see if there's some sort of anchor or trigger for that feeling that I can deploy at will.

And I want to explore the reasons for the dread, too. Like, what am I really dreading? Not writing itself, surely. What experience am I afraid of having? What unpleasantness am I assuming will be part of the writing process that maybe doesn't have to be?

I don't expect to 100% solve the problem of avoidance this way. But I'm hoping to mitigate it. I think that's reasonable.

Whatever I figure out, or even whatever I'm trying to figure out, you'll no doubt hear about it here. So, er, buckle up, I guess?

Hell yeah! "More tomorrow" actually happened! It probably wouldn't have happened if a friends date hadn't fallen through, leaving me at loose ends for the evening, but the evening I can't make lemonade out of those lemons is the evening when THE LEMONS WERE A LIE anyway.

(When and why did we decide "lemon" was slang for "a bad deal"? Lemons are tasty! They smell nice too! A bit of lemon juice in my water bottle before roller derby practice and my hydration improves significantly!)

So, briefly, to report on the Recalibrated Catch-Up Project: I'm still on track. For the November 19 release, Step 2 ("the real draft") was not finished on Day 2, but I did finish it up on Day 3. It's getting uploaded tonight or at the very latest tomorrow morning, and then it goes live on Friday.

Sometimes a story doesn't come together easily at all. Doesn't matter how long or short the story; anything from flash to 6K has the potential to be either a breeze or an ordeal. The November 19 Friday Fictionette was an ordeal, though not as "ordeally" as November 12 was. (No surprises there. November 12 was a novel-length idea I was trying to compress down to flash. Which: No.) And the difference between an ordeal and a breeze is in the answer to the question "Can I write a full draft in a single setting?" Or, for longer stories, "Can I go the entire session without hitting the 'I don't know what to write next' wall?"

I have a Process. It goes like this:

1. Think about the story.
2. Write the story.
3. Stop thinking about the story.
4. Write more of the story.
5. Return to Step 1.

That's kind of glib and not precisely accurate. It's more like, I have two active modes, which are "thinking about the story" and "writing the story," and I switch between the two when I get to the end of the progress I can make via the one I'm on.

Frustratingly, through, sometimes I can't make progress in either mode. That's when the passive mode, Step 3 above, comes into play. Go do something else. Think about something else. Better yet, go to sleep. Stop thinking about the story and let the story think about itself for a while.

This is what makes a compressed schedule for Friday Fictionettes such a challenge. If I'm trying to get one finished in three days or less, well, there's only two sleeps it can benefit from.

I tried to account for that these past few days by scheduling myself two specific sessions per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. (Monday and today, it worked well. Yesterday was trickier because I had roller derby practice, but I was able to turn the 20-minute drive into an active "thinking about the story" session, which got me a plan for this morning's "writing the story" session.) And today I got the last bit untangled during a sort of mix of thinking and not thinking--I mean, I planned to go for a walk and actively think about the story, but mostly I just thought about the crows and the hawk that I saw.

tl;dr - If I've only got three days to work on a story, my best bet is to turn each day into two or three mini-days. It worked this time, anyway.

Speaking of derby, I have derby news! We are hosting a public bout on January 8. You can find all the details on Facebook: Preps vs. Goths! January 8! Doors at 5 PM, First Whistle at 6!. "Preps vs. Goths" is the theme for the adult bout, but there will also be a JUNIORS bout (theme: Freaks vs. Geeks) and we couldn't be more proud!

Here is the online ticket sales page. Extra special hint from me to you: Using the discount code "Fleur" (as in, the short form of my derby name) to get $2 off the price of your ticket! (Discount code is caps-sensitive. Upper-case "F", lower-case "leur".)

(Do go read the FB event page; you don't have to have a Facebook log-in to read it, and that's where the most up-to-date COVID protocols for the event can be found. Those details will most likely be evolving between now and bout day, so keep an eye on it.)

It's already midway through December and I owe y'all a Friday Fictionette round-up post. But first, a report on the Great Big Catch-up Project.

There was slippage. There was significant slippage. There was sufficient slippage that I had to recalculate my schedule and my expectations. At this point, returning to my three-day/step process (1. babble draft, 2. real draft, 3. compile/produce/upload), I will be All Caught Up by the end of the month. Which is to say, by the end of the year. Which still gets 2022 started off right, but does mean a couple more weeks of this accelerated pace and prioritizing the Friday Fictionette project over all else.

Nevertheless, I did manage to submit two poems at the end of last month, log their rejections yesterday, and submit a story today. And also make this post! (Finally.) So my writing life isn't being entirely monopolized by the catch-up initiative. Only maybe like 98%.

So here's the Friday Fictionette Round-up for October 2021!

October 1: "Transplant" (ebook, audio) In which we flourish and thrive. She'd stopped being able to move her right arm at all a couple days ago.

October 8: "One Oracle, Two Swords, and a Thief" (ebook, audio) In which we're only following orders. He wondered whose death the Hex Queen had bound to such a banal purpose.

October 15: "The Old Weaver Retires" (ebook, audio) In which someone other than the usual suspects sets off on an adventure. She'd never enjoyed weaving. It was why she'd run away to the Palace in the first place.

October 22: "Revisions" (ebook, audio) In which time travelers micromanage your life. At times you grow tired of your advisers from the future.

The Fictionette Freebie for October 2021 is "The Old Weaver Retires". You can follow the links above to read it in the ebook format of your choice (available in epub, mobi, and pdf) and/or download the audio version (narrated by the author) regardless of your subscription status/pledge tier or lack thereof.

All for now. Probably more tomorrow. Until then!

Oh hey how is it the 30th already? Welp.

No regrets, though. The month has gone more or less to plan. Well, other than my weekends having a tendency to disappear in a puff of roller derby. In my defense, it wasn't just regular practice but also holiday parties and trail skating and all the activities associated with moving into our new practice facility. This past week, we put down the Sport Court and then we taped a track outline and then we were all like, "Well, we know we said no practice Tuesday night because of Thanksgiving but hey, let's skate Tuesday night anyway because NEW FLOOR WHO DIS?" And yes, Tuesday is not a weekend day. What's your point?

Anyways, some writing time was lost here and there, and I am slightly behind on my big ambitious Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project upload schedule. But only a little! There is one, count it, (1) short-short story-like object that should have gone out by now that has not. That is an entirely surmountable bit of slippage. I can soak that. It'll go up and be released this Friday along with the other two that ought to be, and everything will be back on track for a December 17 ALL CAUGHT UP celebration. (A private celebration. That takes place in my head.) And there should be an October 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up post next week. JUST YOU WAIT.

What else? Well, tonight I am in Steamboat Springs, doing about the same thing I do with all my days except less roller derby, more writing, and a different subset of the Rocky Mountains out my window. To be entirely specific, I am currently sitting at a table in WildPlum Grocer (and coffee shop, and bar, and liquor store) enjoying the writing-at-a-cafe sensation I have so rarely experienced since March of last year. It's also nice to get out of the hotel room. It's mostly comfy and has a nice view, but my poor feet got sick of dangling. The only table or desk set-up in that place is sort of bar-stool, and I am a short person who can't even reach those tall chairs' support bars. And I needed a slight change of scenery from my change of scenery, I guess.

("What are you going to do in Steamboat?" we get asked. "Enjoying the opening week of skiing?" No, we don't ski. "Then... um... what exactly are you doing?" BEING HERE. Shut up.)

More news of note: Before we left Boulder for this little vacation-like activity, I bought a whole bunch of dried fruit and nuts. FRUITCAKE WILL HAPPEN THIS YEAR. And now you know.

So what with the Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project going so well, I guess I can post the Fictionette Round-Up for August 2021. Actually, I could have posted it... *checks notes* ...any old time in November, since the August 27 release went up on Nov 1. Welp, here they are now: links to, and teaser text from, the short story-like objects originally scheduled for the first four (and only four) Fridays in August:

Friday, August 6, 2021: "The New Undertaker" (ebook, audio) In which we have a changing of the guard, about which the old guard is ill-informed. This wasn't an apprentice. This was a usurper.

Friday, August 13, 2021: "When It Calls, You Have to Go" (ebook, audio) In which some parties withstand unearthly temptation, and others enthusiastically give in. Tom still hadn't come home.

Friday, August 20, 2021: "Who's Afraid of the Dark?" (ebook, audio) In which we visit lodgings with a most unusual innkeeper. Of course, you, dear reader, are too sophisticated to believe in vampires.

Friday, August 27, 2021: "King of All He Surveyed" (ebook, audio) In which revisit a beloved bedtime story. I'll tell it to you exactly the way I remember my mother telling it to me.

"Who's Afraid of the Dark?" is the Fictionette Freebie for the month. That's the one you can read and/or listen to without having to be a Patron at any tier. Check it out! I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you do too.

So you remember how I described the three-day process for producing overdue fictionettes in a hurry? I said Day 1 was for the babble-draft, Day 2 was for the final draft, and Day 3 was for production? Yes, well, about that: it turns out the final draft stage is not the work of a single day. Typically it's been more like "extra practice drafts and eventually a final draft" and it's been creeping into Day 3. This has not, fortunately, thrown any wrenches in my schedule. Turns out since the production stage only takes about an hour and a half or so, I can fit some last minute drafting and polishing on Day 3. Heck, the one time I didn't finish production until the morning of the next fictionette's Day 1, there was still plenty of time left in the day for the scheduled babble-draft session.

(Besides, late uploads would be pretty much invisible from where y'all are standing, what with them not going live until the following Friday morning.)

What I've learned is, not only is this 3-day schedule working, but it's got some room for flex in it. So that's good. Especially since the one for September 24 is giving me trouble. So, you know how the Friday Fictionette for any given week is based on a freewriting session from the corresponding week in the previous month? (If not, now you do.) Well, sometimes I choose a freewriting session not because it would positively make a good fictionette, but because it is the least bad of my options from a week of slim pickings. "Future me is going to hate me for this," I'll mutter to myself as I copy it over.

GUESS WHAT. Past me was a jerk.

It's OK. After today's session of babbling on the page about it, I feel kinda almost secure about maybe attempting a real practice draft that might magically transform itself into a final draft beneath my very fingers. Maybe. I hope.

On a Friday.

Um. Well, there should be time in Saturday for whatever doesn't get done tomorrow. Theoretically.

So far, so good. So excellent.

We're on day 8 of November, and I have made 100% of my writing goals thus far. Morning Pages every day, freewriting every day, and sufficient daily work on the overdue Friday Fictionettes that I have indeed uploaded a pair of fictionette posts (one for the ebook, one for the audio) every third day. (If you visit my Patreon, count up the new posts, and come up short, remember that, from this point onward, they don't go live until the following first-through-fourth-Friday.)

My other goals are more like 98%. There were a couple days when I neither skated nor got to my physical therapy homework, but I definitely exercised, considering those days included Friday when I regularly handle heavy boxes of food and Saturday when I helped my roller derby league move into our new practice space.

And I've been more or less faithful to my sleep schedule goals; if I let midnight slip or snoozed a bit past 8:30, at least I wasn't up until three or in bed straight until noon. What's important is, I'm getting enough sleep and I'm getting up in time to start writing in the morning every morning. That's aided the push for dailiness tremendously.

Another thing that's helped is, I've gone back to regularly attending the co-writing sessions available to Cat Rambo's online community. The morning session is at 9:30 AM my time, and the afternoon one is at 3:00 PM. Each session comprises three 30-minute "sprints," before which attendees share what they intend to use the sprint for and after which we report on how it went. So on the days my schedule allows me to attend, I know exactly when my writing can and must happen, and for how long.

It's a schedule. I spent several months being severely allergic to schedules. I guess I'm not anymore. Brains are weird.

What I've not gone back to doing is keeping a timesheet. Turns out, tracking my hours isn't worth the inadvertent barrier to starting work that it turned into. I think about going back to it, and then I think about how nice it is to just open up the Scrivener project and dump words into it without ritual or rigmarole. How pleasant it is to just forgo all the bureaucratic rituals and throat-clearing exercises and just start.

At one time, that spreadsheet was useful to me because I needed to gather information about my writing process: what time of day is best for me to write at? How long do I go before I run out of oomph? How long does it take to produce a Friday Fictionette from a finished text? I think I have a pretty good idea of those things now, so I'm scheduling my days accordingly as much as possible. I may go back to timesheet-as-data-gathering after November, when my daily round will change significantly by, for instance, going back to my regular weekly submission procedures and hopefully making a dent in my story-revision queue. (Also attempting to post here daily. I take forever with these posts. Argh.) But for now my schedule is appropriate to my November list of Daily Required Items. Further data-gathering is not urgent at this time.

Now, shortly after I quit my day job to write full time with my husband's support, I used a spreadsheet to assuage my guilt. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just taking a permanent vacation. I was still working, dammit! See? I put in my five hours today! Unfortunately, that had a tendency to lead to more guilt if I didn't make my five hours.

The timesheet has historically been useful, on and off through the years, in helping me end long, depressive non-writing slumps. But I'm finding that strategy less useful for that now, as the thought of setting up the daily timesheet has increased my avoidance rather than lessened it. So it's time to let the dratted thing go.

So what's working for me instead? A whole bunch of things mixed together, that's what.

There's what I think of as "imaginary external accountability," where I state my goals and intentions somewhere public, thus making myself feel obligated to live up to them so I don't disappoint the version of You, the Reader who lives in my head. Hence blog posts like this one.

Then there's actual external accountability, where I've shared my goals with my fellow writers in the aforementioned co-writing sessions, one of those goals being to regularly show up. I know they're expecting me and they might ask me how the big Patreon Catch-up Project is going. I want to be there and give them good news!

There will be, hopefully, the momentum I build up by following this schedule all through November. I'm hoping that my current routine will take on the force of habit and more or less perpetuate itself through December and beyond.

But probably the most important component is how pleased and proud I am at the end of a day where I met all my goals, checked off all my items, and am happy with the process I made. Look, if I can keep up this pace, I will be entirely caught up on the Friday Fictionette release schedule by December 17! I'm excited about that! I want to make that happen! And not being constantly behind schedule will open up so much time and energy for other stories, other projects, other goals, to which I can bring the same kind of energy and attention I've been putting toward this ficitonette-every-three-days initiative--now that I know I have that kind of energy and attention available.

And I'm just going to be happier with myself and less stressed out. Imagining that less-stressed and more optimistic version of Future Me is probably my biggest motivator to keep up this pace and meet my daily goals.

All right, maybe this is just Week One optimism. Everyone doing NaNoWriMo in the classic mode gets super-excited about their novels during Week One. But then comes the Week Two Slump. I'm hoping the non-noveling equivalent does not lie in wait for me. If I encounter a slump of my own... well, I'll reread this blog post to remind myself of reasons to be excited, that's what I'll do.

(Sometimes the Imaginary Reader on whom I'm basing my Imaginary External Accountability... is me.)

Let's just write October off as non-existent. To heck with October. It's November now, and you know what that means.

No, I do not have a novel to work on. I have something much more pressing: the dratted Friday Fictionette release schedule. I haven't been on top of it since September of last year, and now I am now precisely two months behind. That is ridonkulous. So my NaNoWriMo will be about fixing that, in part if not in whole. Also about fixing my writing LIFE, because seriously.

So I have goals. Well, I have two overall goals: 1. get caught up on Friday Fictionettes, and 2. instill and strengthen habits for a more sustainable writing life. But in the service of those big overarching goals, I have this list of small, concrete daily goals, and they go like this:

• Get to bed on time by midnight
• Get up between 7:45 and 8:30
• Morning Pages every day, as soon after getting up as possible. (No computer nuthin' 'til they're done.)
• 1,000 words, ish, freewriting to a prompt every day.
• Significant progress on the current Friday Fictionette (see below).
• Some physical exercise: either skating or my physical therapy homework.

That's it. Those are the required daily items for November. I'm demoting submission procedures and the production of submittable materials to "Nice to Haves" for the month. That frees me up to let "significant progress" take however much time it needs.

So, what's "significant progress" on a fictionette? It's completing one of the three main steps in Friday Fictionette production. That phrase makes it sound so dang industrial, doesn't it? Ergh. Like a factory assembly line. Only it kinda is, and there are three stations in the factory.

1. Babble-draft. This is where I reread the freewriting session I've chosen as the current fictionette's base material, then flail about on the page in search of the story's final form. There will be a lot of disjointed questions, notes, ideas, etc. Babble. Usually includes some practice drafts as I try out different approaches. If I'm lucky, there's an "a-ha" moment where it all comes together. More often, layers of babble and practice draft and process eventually result in me having a solid plan for writing the final draft. Once I have that solid plan, this step is done.

2. Working and Final Draft. This part is basically plotter-style NaNoWriMo, or the process Rachel Aaron describes in her book and on her blog: I come to this writing session knowing what I'm going to write, and so I write it. A few more discoveries may yet be waiting along the way, but they're unlikely to change the fundamental structure of the story at this point. Then there's some final polishing and word-count reduction. Then I'm done. Except for the Author's Note, of course. Argh. What am I gonna put in the Author's Note this time? After some overthinking and stress, I come up with something, and then I argh all over again because titles, y'all. But then it's done.

3. Production. Narrating, recording, and producing the MP3 version. Creating the cover image. Compiling to PDF, ebook, and HTML. And finally throwing all those elements into a couple Patreon posts which, if I'm on top of things (ha! ha!) I will then schedule for publication at 8:00 AM on Friday. This all sounds like a lot, but it's the easiest bit, really. It's the most factory-like of the whole assembly line. Takes maybe an hour and a half.

So. "Significant progress" means doing one of those three things. Every day. Which theoretically means I could be All Caught Up in 3 X [Number of Overdue Fictionettes] days, right? Only there will inevitably be slippage, because I suck, or maybe it's just life that sucks sometimes. But! I fully intend to suck less in November. I'm off to a great start! 100% completion yesterday and today. Checked off every item on the above list. Yesterday, in fact, was a Working/Final Draft and Production day for the August 27 fictionette. And today, in addition to being Babble-Draft day for the Sept 3 release, also afforded time to work on a new poem which I hope to submit to Eternal Haunted Summer, and to do a small spot of submission procedures, too. And this blog post. While also holding down the fort waiting for an on-site computer repair technician who never actually showed. And then going to derby. Which was a footage watching party instead of actual skating, because weather, but hey, that's why I did my PT today.

All of which goes to say: NaNoWriMo Days 1 and 2 have been complete successes... so much so that I'm nervous about the inevitable crash. About waking up tomorrow and thinking, "Shit, now I have to live up to the level of production I achieved on Monday and Tuesday," and then just collapsing under the weight of self-expectation. Plus, tomorrow's Wednesday, and Wednesdays are infamous for failing to exist around here.

Except tomorrow's a Wednesday in November, and November is going to rock.

Because I said so.

So there.

Oh, I get it. This week, Thursday doesn't exist. Well, drat.

Of course, I say that as though it just happened to me, rather than being a function of the choices I've made throughout the day... but sometimes it just happens that the right choices are harder to make. Ah well.

So since I don't have a lot of Actually Writing to talk about, I'll share a book report instead. One of the creators I follow on Patreon is author Billy Martin. Now, I'm reasonably fond of his writing, so when he posted that his favorite Halloween story is The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes, I hied me over to Barnes & Noble and picked up the ebook. (I have a rather large amount of gift card credit in my B&N account thanks to years of futzing around with Swagbucks and Rewarded Play, and I've got things set up to port their ebooks over to calibre with a minimum of fuss. So that's why B&N for spur-of-the-moment ebook purchases.)

All in all, it's been a rather delightful read. I'm not done yet, mind you; I'm having too much fun reading it aloud to myself, and that takes a bit longer than reading silently. So I'm only up to the end of the chapter that introduces Weeny Witch, which calibre tells me is just about at the halfway point. I cannot, therefore, give you my thoughts on whether it sticks the landing, but I can say that the journey has been overall a joy.

The plot, briefly, is this: After an afternoon of being regaled with stories about the wickedness of Old Witch, Amy resolves that Old Witch must for her sins be banished to the top of a bare and lonely glass mountain--but if Old Witch is very good, which is to say, good as real, right, regular little girls reckon it and not as wicked witches do, why then, Old Witch may come back for a hurly-burly on Halloween. And so Old Witch, under protest, attempts to be good, and her progress is strictly monitored by Amy, Amy's best friend Clarissa, and the stern spelling bee Malachi.

It probably sounds very twee, and it kind of is, but only in the way that a story by E. Nesbit is twee. Say, The Book of Dragons, or of course Five Children and It. The details of Amy and Clarissa's day-to-day are lavish and true, from the neighbor's linden tree with the rope swing hanging off it, to the rules about witches' hats, to the minutia of witches' rituals (the "backanally" dance, the wiggling, the correct position from which to recite one of the greater abracadabras), to the various lessons learned in Witch School. And all the while the narrator feels like another character herself, one who's sharing knowing glances with you over the heads of the characters and otherwise acknowlegding your expected reactions to the events that befall them.

One thing I didn't expect going in: it's metafiction, or partially so. Old Witch is a character in the stories Amy's mother has been telling her for a long time now, and when Amy and Clarissa perform their feat of "banquishment," it sounds like they're playing make-believe. Every event in the chapters featuring Old Witch appears to be caused by Amy's imagination. And yet... a real little red cardinal bird flies Amy's letters up to the bare glass mountain for Old Witch and the Little Witch Girl to read. When the Little Witch Girl gets lost on her way to Witch School, she winds up in front of Amy's house and spies the children through the window. And it's Little Witch Girl herself who causes Amy and Clarissa--by means of her greatest abracadabra thus far--to be magically transported to the house atop the glass mountain for her birthday party (for just because she stays six forever doesn't mean she can't have birthday parties!). The lines between fact and fiction get charmingly blurred, and that's where the magic happens.

On the downside, the book has a troubling tendency to equate "fair-haired" and "blond" with "pretty." Little Witch Girl is blond, which is "very unusual in a witch," and when she arrives, Old Witch is "weak with wonder at the dazzling spectacle of a beautiful fair-haired little witch girl." And of course when Amy and Clarissa show up at the birthday party, all the black-haired witches are fascinated with their fair hair and their colorful dresses. It doesn't come up often, but when it does, it feels downright colonial--like those bad old stories claiming that natives of the Americas, never having seen white people before, worshiped the Europeon explorers as gods. At one point, I double-checked the publication date and was surprised to find it as recent as 1960, and not contemporaneous with E. Nesbit's books (Five Children and It was originally published in 1902).

And no, I'm not going to wave it off as "of its time"--I take a very dim view of that excuse, as it not only gives racists the privilege of determining the norm for the era, it also erases the viewpoints of people of color. Like, every time someone says "Nobody knew that was a problem back then," they're ignoring that the people whom those words or behavior hurt damn well knew it was a problem.

Like I said, it doesn't come up often, and mostly I can tune it out. But I'm not going to sit here like an oblivious white woman and unilaterally declare it no big deal. I'm honestly not sure I'd feel comfortable reading it to young children who are already getting enough racist messages from our society without this book smuggling racist beauty standards into their ears under the guise of Halloween fun.

I bring this up not because it ruins the book for me but because I can't in good conscience just not mention it. Consider this a content note. Otherwise, this book is being a delight and a joy and I'm getting a kick out of it.

And that's my book report. Good night!

Hullo! This blog is not dead. Furthermore, actual writing happened today. On a Wednesday, even! UNHEARD OF. Generally my Tuesdays are epic and my Wednesdays are nonexistent. But this week both Tuesday and Wednesday were productive--and on a human scale, which is much more sustainable.

I've been experimenting with different scheduling brain-hacks, trying to see how best to trick my brain into behaving itself. Today's experiment involved a "done by" rather than "start at" check-list. "Let's see. Task one is my Morning Pages, which I'm in the middle of now" (Morning Pages tends to be where I figure out the shape of my day) "and I should be done by 1:00 PM. Next I have to record the Wednesday show for AINC, which I ought to be able to get done by 3:00 PM. Then the daily freewriting--that usually takes 25 minutes, but let's say done by 4:00 PM..." And so forth.

The unexpected benefit of all this was, although I had an idea that one task's "done by" was really just code for the next task's "start by," if I missed that start-by time by a few minutes, I didn't suddenly feel like I'M LATE I MISSED THE START TIME WHAT'S THE POINT ANYMORE. I knew I could get it done by whatever done-by time I'd intended. If I got it done early, I could futz around with clicky-games for a bit. Or I could futz around with clicky-games while I did the task, so long as I still got it done by the done-by time.

So, basically, we're talking about One Weird Trick to lessen the pressure and anxiety miasma surrounding certain writing tasks. It reminded me of Havi Brooks's "code words" strategy, although perhaps not at the same level of mental role play as the example she gives in the linked blog post. Today it worked. Who knows if it'll work tomorrow--tomorrow I may have a very different brain on--but I'll try it and see.

So, having gotten all my work (give or take a checklist item) done by a reasonable time of the afternoon, I had time to make salsa.

It has been a good year for tomatoes. A very, very good year. Every week, 63rd St. Farm has been sending me home with some five to eight slicing tomatoes and a selection of heirloom tomatoes, saucing tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. It sort of piles up. And then there's a bit on one of the really pretty heirloom tomatoes that's starting to look iffy if not downright moldy, and that's how you know it's high time to do something with these tomatoes, y'all.

The Conservatory Kitchen Presents: Improv Tomato-culling Salsa

1. Starting with the oldest, worst-looking tomato in the bunch and moving up from there, cut off the bad bits and see what's left. (The aforementioned heirloom with the moldy spot cleaned up surprisingly well!) Put the good bits on the kitchen scale until the kitchen scale says 2 lbs or thereabouts. Take these accumulated good bits, dice 'em and chop 'em and mangle 'em, and stick 'em in a big bowl. (Bigger than that. You need room to stir, OK?)
2. To this add about a quarter pound of diced onion--yeah, that half-an-onion that's sitting around in the crisper drawer (dear Gods, organic yellow onions are HUGE these days), that'll do--and maybe three green onions and five nice-sized garlic cloves and oh, hey, something hot. Five serrano peppers sounds about right. (Serrano peppers are another veggie I've been accumulating.)
3. Spices. Very simple. About a teaspoon dried oregano and about a half teaspoon ground cumin. Fresh ground peppercorns of all colors: black, white, pink. More than that. KEEP GRINDING. Maybe a teaspoon of salt? More? I dunno, the chips you're gonna dip in this mess are gonna be salty already, aren't they?
4. Stir stir stir. Taste. What do you think? Did I forget anything? No, I left out the cilantro on purpose. Can't stand the stuff. More for you, right? Hm. Maybe parsley. Maybe a diced peach if one's rolling around the fruit bowl.
5. Let sit in the fridge until party time. If no parties are in the offing, throw one for yourself. Show yourself a good time. You deserve it.

And there you go. Salsa. By the time I was done, I only had about 15 tomatoes left in the house and maybe 10 serrano peppers. SHUT UP, THAT'S PROGRESS.