author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

My goal for this week is to finish "The Impact of Snowflakes." Not necessarily finish-and-submit, but finish. Finish the new ending, for the love of little orange cheez-its! Stop circling in and just land this sorry lawn-mower of a plane!

And today I made absolutely no progress toward that goal. Today I was running errands both in person and on the telephone, most of them to do with the catastrophe-related restorations on our home that will start Monday the 11th. These errands stole most of my morning time, and, indirectly, by way of exhausting me utterly, most of my afternoon too. Essentially, the less said about weeding the garden, the better.

But I remain optimistic. Tomorrow is a whole new day. So are Thursday and Friday. With their help, I feel sure I'll get where I want to go.

Meanwhile, I am have been giving more thought to this Patreon-enabled short story subscription service I've been brainstorming. I've also been having a look around at what other authors are doing with their Patreon pages. I'd like to share a few of them with you this week.

Thus: Kellan Sparver is creating short stories and fiction.

Kellan Sparver is a colleague of mine whom I met via Codex, an online community of neo-pro genre writers. He's just launched his page recently. What he's doing with it highlights one of Patreon's patronage models, that of pledging a certain amount of money per creation. It works like this: You pledge, say, five dollars per story. Then, when he posts a story--for example, the SF short "Hitchhiker"--you're automatically charged for it at the end of the month. (Note: Patreon allows you to specify a maximum monthly amount--a budget, if you will--to protect you in case of sudden and expected prolificness on the part of the creators you're supporting. Details here, under "For Patrons.")

The pledge form is pre-filled with a suggested amount of $3 per story, but you are welcome to pledge as much or as little as you like, in, I think, whole dollar amounts. (Currently it looks like Sparver's Patrons are pledging an average of $5 per story.) Below that, Sparver defines a couple of "milestone goals" to give Patrons a bit of context. Should the total of all pledges reach $25 per story, he'll be earning an equivalent amount to what he would if he sold each piece to a "token" or "for the love" market. Should he reach $200 per story, that's like selling a 3500-word story for pro rates, as defined by SFWA as 6 cents per word.

Another example of per-creation pledges is the Patreon page of Clarkesworld Magazine. As an alternative to subscribing at a fixed rate, you can pledge your preferred amount per issue. Clarkesworld pledges in return to include extra stories in each issue depending on having reached certain milestone goals. Clarkesworld's page also defines several tiers of individual support that will earn Patrons rewards both tangible and intangible--access to downloadable electronic copies of the magazine, having print copies mailed to you, having your name included in the annual anthology's list of "Clarkesworld Citizens."

For me, the upside to the per-creation model is not tying myself to a production schedule. If something went terribly wrong for me one month, I wouldn't have the added stress of knowing that I was failing to give my supporters the stories they'd paid for. No story means no one gets charged. Simple. (Although John would probably say that's the wrong way to think about this. "Patreon isn't about selling a product," he told me the other day. "It's about giving people a way to support your art, and thanking them for that support.") But the upside is also a downside--it wouldn't hold me to a production schedule. Not that a production schedule is impossible on the per-creation model--again, see Clarkesworld. But I'm not sure I trust myself to stick to a schedule without hanging the Anvil of Guilt over my head.

Anyway, thoughts are still coming and going. These are some of them. There will be more thoughts tomorrow.

Each week's farm work has a lesson to impart. Today's lesson was about maintenance, the importance of, for use in taking control of one's future or at least exerting control over the shape thereof. In other words, weeding.

We spent all morning in the herb garden. The goal was to harvest a bunch of variations of thyme and also the winter savory, but first a lot of weeding was needed. And it's amazing how the weeds just take over. You think you're keeping up with them, but suddenly they bolt, and now you've got a four-foot ragweed stalk shooting up out of the center of your mother-of-thyme like it thinks it belongs there.

It has always struck me as particularly unfair that the crop you want always seems to grow slower than the weeds you don't want. Thyme is a ground cover, right? In addition to being an herb? And lemon balm is a species of mint, which is known for getting out of control. And yet, if you leave the crop bed to its own devices, you will eventually find your mint, thyme and savory drowning in bindweed and thistle and lamb's-quarter and ragweed and ouch did I mention the thistle? Yes, well, I only mention it because a pile of it is what I sat in just now.

So before we got to harvesting, we had to pull up or slice out a bunch of weeds.

Then there was harvesting itself, which is also a lesson in how important it is to deliberately maintain. Best practice with leafy herbs is to keep them from flowering just as long as you can, forcing the plant to put all its energy and growth and aromatic oils into its leaves. Once the plant starts blossoming, seed-time can't be far behind, and before you know it the leaves have diminished markedly in flavor. Also, if you don't cut them back often, herbs like thyme and savory start changing from soft green sprigs to stiff woody stems that don't make for a high-quality harvest. So there's that.

We made up for a lot of lost time today and harvested a heck of a lot of thyme. And I brought home a few flowering sprigs of savory for that corn chowder I intend to cook any day now.

My daily routine is a lot like that, too--without deliberate maintenance, the stuff I want (good habits) tends to drown under the stuff I don't want (bad habits). Working with HabitRPG has been a big help, but even when I click my way to a perfect day there are loopholes to slither out of. Like, yes, I did my Morning Pages even on a Monday, but did I do it right when I woke up, or did I snooze away my before-farm time and leave it hanging over my afternoon? Yes, I checked voice mail on the land line today, good for me, but did I do it as part of my arrival home, or did I only remember to do when I saw that the corresponding HabitRPG "Daily" task was still not checked off? When I put in my five hours writing on a work day, did it go towards meaningful progress on my career goals or was it just busywork? Did I get right to my daily writing tasks, or did I putter around, reading forums and blogs, playing jigsaw sudoku and Puzzle Pirates, until finally, late in the afternoon, I finally and grudgingly gave in to basic arithmetic, recognizing that if I didn't start now it would be chronologically impossible to clock five hours for the day?

Well. As for today, damn straight I did my Pages before I went to the farm. And when I got the call that I wouldn't be needed until 45 minutes later than usual, I did my CTC29 too.

That's what I call daily weed-pulling!

Still, I'm sure that by tomorrow they'll be making a vigorous comeback. Hopefully I'll be up to the task of knocking them back again.

Not to leave you hanging, but there isn't a whole lot more information than there was yesterday, because I am indecisive and stuff. But here's what I've got so far--

Wait. Drat. I keep getting interrupted mid-blog by the sound of what is undoubtedly yet another instance of Bat In The Belfry. Er, mansard. Soffit? It's pattering about up there, so it's only a matter of time before it comes swooping out into the still-attic-like office. That's what happened last night, anyway, and also several weeks ago. We basically waited for it to get tired, then we waited for it to come out from its hiding place in the baseboard heater, then we trapped it against the wall in a big plastic soup bin with which we tipped it out the window.

Well, I've got the soup bin ready.

Don't worry. It won't be forever. In a little more than a week, the house is getting all its interior repairs. We will have whole ceilings again. After that, we'll be able to ignore the sounds of bats in the soffit because at least then we'll know they won't be able to get into the living spaces of the house. They'll just keep us up nights pattering around amidst the joists, that's all.

Right. Where was I? Information. I have very little of that. What I've got are thoughts.

The first thought was, "I'd like to do something like this." This being Bruce Holland Rogers's subscription service, Short-Short Stories. For $10 per year, subscribers get three short stories a month emailed to them. They're very short, most of them between 500 and 1500 words long, unpredictable in genre, sometimes oddly unclassifiable. Apparently he has about 1,000 subscribers and most of them do renew each year. That's a nice deal for everyone: 36 new stories for each subscriber every year, and, if that subscriber number holds steady, a respectable side income of $10,000 (ish) for the author.

Obviously I like money. I'd like to make more of it by writing. I joke about being a full-time writer on the spousal subsidy grant, but I'd like to rely on the spousal subsidy somewhat less than I do. But there's also a handful of intangible benefits going on here that I'm interested in. The author is writing and completing way more stories than I do in a year. This is no doubt helped along by 1) knowing he's got an audience waiting to read them, and 2) knowing that the audience has already paid for the product. That mutually beneficial relationship between expectant audience and productive writer is something I'd like to explore.

I also recently was introduced to Patreon, "bringing patronage back to the 21st century." It's a way for creators to find funding, and audiences to support creators in a more ongoing way than via one-time Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaigns. Its interface looks perfect for doing something like what Rogers is doing, but with potential for different levels of support receiving different levels of product. Except not exactly product. Patreon's emphasis is not monetizing products, but rather on enabling a mutually beneficial relationship between audience and creator. See above.

I was bouncing some ideas about this off of John--that was the extent of my researching the project today--and he suggested that I produce a certain amount of short fiction to post for free, and that supporters via Patreon could get them ahead of schedule. Other ideas I've been noodling on include taking those same stories and recording an audio version of them, or a decent ebook that exposes more of my daily process, or...

"But who wants to see my daily process? I mean, me. Not Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin, but little old me. How is that worth money to anyone?"

"You'd be surprised."

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do quite yet. But I do know this: What with all my daily freewriting, I've got oodles more raw material on my hard-drive than I could turn into salable fiction at my current rate of production, and certainly more than anyone but me will ever read at my current rate of commercial publication. This idea I have that every ounce of my writing, no matter how rough and incomplete, needs to be protected jealously from "wasting" its first rights just in case I'll come back to it and develop it into a story that will see print in Asimov's or F&SF or something... well, it's based in truth but I think I take it too far. And so I do less with my writing than I could.

Instead, I could be developing some of those daily vignettes and thought-experiments into short fiction, prose-poems, odd unclassifiables, things that, while not viable in most professional slush piles due to their form or format, might still be worth putting in front of other people's eyeballs. It would be a good practice, releasing these small things on a schedule, and, hey, y'all might enjoy reading 'em.

So that's where my head is at, right at this moment.

Meanwhile, I'm one day into the Conquer the Craft in 29 Days challenge (it's apparently not too late to join!), which will require me to do my daily freewriting on an actually daily schedule. Y'know, as opposed to just Tuesdays through Fridays. Which means more raw material to throw at this subscription-style relationship-with-audience-building project I'm noodling on. Hooray!

I expect I'll spend most of August figuring out what I want to do and what kind of schedule I can keep to. As I have more thoughts, I may end up floating 'em by you. If you have thoughts, well, I don't have comments enabled on this blog (I don't in fact have any mechanism for comments programmed on this blog, if you want to be precise), but I do read Twitter at-replies and Facebook comments. And there's always good old email.

And I think I will go ahead and set up that Patreon page, just so I can explore the interface, and see what other authors are doing with it.

(That bat never did come down out of the soffit. Hopefully it went back outside via whatever hole it used to come in.)

Apologies for the radio silence. It's been a month-end sort of week. There's been stuff. Hugo-nominated stuff to read and vote on, a friend moving to Boulder to help unpack, late night celebrations of said friend having arrived in Boulder and of getting successfully unpacked and moved in, needing to pack up our own stuff in advance of some heavy-duty kicking-us-out-of-the-house-for-a-week renovations, and, OK, well, the July Seal o' Piracy to earn on all the production oceans and Ice too because I'm a total nerd.

However, I have been working away like a beaver on the short story. I'm still having a stupid time with the ending, but I'm happy to report that one of the interim scenes got heavily overhauled to make room in it for things that should make the ending more possible to write. So there's that.

Also I have decided where I'm going to send it when it's done. Hint: The deadline is August 15. So this thing is getting done by then, OK?

(OK.)

Meanwhile, the end of July means the beginning of August. I have allowed some good writerly friends to talk me into doing this nonsense over here over the month of August, and now I'm rather looking forward to it. At the very least, I will not lack for Daily Idea writing prompts.

Speaking of the Daily Idea/freewriting portion of my routine, I'm researching the viability of a Project. At this point, it can only be described as subscription-based along some regular time line or other, possibly Patreon-enabled, and hopefully more feasible than my track record on dailiness thus far would indicate.

Well. That was very nearly-information free. There may be more information tomorrow. Stay tuned.

In terms of time spent writing, yesterday was pretty much non-existent. Today was only about an hour better. (Context: I aim for five hours a day Tuesday through Friday.)

Despite the low time clock report, today feels better. Its emotional weight rests more lightly upon the psyche. I can think of two reasons for that; there may be others.

First reason is, it was better even if it wasn't much better. Half an hour's work on the short story is better than none at all, even if that half hour was mostly me staring at the final scene, typing out a sentence, and then erasing it again. And then re-writing the sentence at the end of the fifth scene. And then staring at the screen, trying to decide whether the flashback at the end of the fifth scene really belongs there or closer to the end of the story. What I'm saying is, it didn't feel like progress at all. However, it was process, and I take it as an item of faith that the process itself is an element of progress. You gotta show up on the page, right?

The other half-hour was my daily freewriting. (Allegedly daily; it didn't happen yesterday either.) My most recent freewriting has been to prompts I came up with Tuesday, when I tasked myself with generating a list of magic realism style concepts which involve mismatched categories. The inspiration was rereading Karin Tidbeck's short story collection Jagannath, which is wonderful and strange, full of elegant nightmares and emotionally resonant weirdness galore. It opens with a story whose theme, I think, is to do with miscommunication and projection, but whose explicit text is about a man who falls in love with an airship and briefly rooms with a woman who is pursuing a love affair with a steam engine. This is what I mean by mismatched categories. Another of her stories expresses the universal angst of parents watching their children become their own unexpected selves, but does so through the textual medium of a woman creating a homunculus in a jam jar. Reading Tidbeck's fiction is like a jolt of electricity to the brain's inspiration center. It makes me want to dream up weird stuff of my own.

So I did. Some of the mismatched category prompts I came up with were: Doors in people's chests which opened upon the heart; a bicycle that hatches out of an egg; buildings as public transportation vehicles; a harp hung up on a wall. The last one isn't exactly a mismatched category situation--musical instruments do often get hung up on the wall--but in my head it was the grisly harp from a particular well-known ballad, years and years after the story takes place, when it begins to "play alone" once more for reasons TBD. After noodling around on the idea today (and trying to determine those reasons), I slapped the "To Do" label on it in Scrivener because I think I'm on to something here.

So it wasn't just that an hour of writing was better than none. It was also that a day on which I come up with a brand new story idea is better than a day on which I don't.

Second reason? It's kind of silly, but, here it is: Yesterday, I mostly poked around listlessly at the internet, thinking, "I really ought to write," until I ran out of time in which to make it happen. Today, by contrast, I very definitively thought, "I ought to get back to the writing, but, dammit, I'm going to play some Puzzle Pirates." And I did.

The moral of the story is this: If you're going to procrastinate, do it deliberately and have fun with it. Otherwise, you might as well get to work.

Hey, look! A blog post. Something else I did today but not yesterday. Third reason!

They are invisible, but horribly bulky. They have presence. They press in on both sides of the interstate, making every driver feel oddly constricted, such that they slow to a crawl and bottleneck the entire highway from Aurora to Thornton. Soon, the entire population of Denver is waiting in the queue. We are talking about traffic so slow that the swallows are perching on the roofs of the trucks as they inch along north and west. Have you ever seen a yellow-bellied swallow hitch a ride on top of a corporate van on the interstate? Well, now I have.

This is the only explanation I've got for why it took me more than two hours to get from Denver International Airport to Longmont. I mean, yes, rush hour traffic, a bad time of the day to take I-70 to I-270 to I-25, but I have never seen it this bad before. So the explanation I'm going with is dragons.

I eventually got to practice and got geared up. About 45 minutes late, but I got there. I very nearly gave up and went home, but I kept telling myself, "You know how much putting on skates cheers you up. Go on. You'll feel better for it." And I do. I really do. Although I also feel extremely tired.

Still managed to take some time to work on the story. I still haven't finished the final scene, but at least I'm not doing yet another revision pass on the whole damn thing. Instead, it's more like, I turn the scene over and over in my head, try to hear the dialogue and pin down the last questions of cosmology, and in doing so I'll stumble upon some element or other that can be cleared up, inserted, or reassembled elsewhere in the story such that the final scene--whatever it turns out to be--will work better. So I feel like I'm slowly spiraling in, getting a better fix on my destination with each turn around the point. When I finally land this plane, it will be awesome.

That's all I've got. Good night all--Channel LeBoeuf-Little is going off the air until morning.

In terms of story revision, today was solid. The read-through edit on the draft in progress finally reached the point where I'd left off drafting before, and I feel a lot more able to finish the draft. Mainly I'm trying to get that last phone call right, along with Ashley's reaction to it. Also, I know a lot more about this story's peculiar apocalypse than I did when I wrote previous drafts. Full sized short stories are different from flash. In a 566-word short-short that's focused more on relationship dynamics than actual worldbuilding, I can get away with not really knowing why the sidewalks melted. In a 5,000-word short story that's focused very specifically on the main characters' roles in the Snowpocalypse, I kind of have to know what those roles are.

I still need to work on the timing. There's no good reason why the last scene needs to take place two days after the scene before it. Again, there's just no leeway for a lull in the action after the OMG moment.

So. One of the thoughts from yesterday's blog post stuck with me. The one about how there are few greater joys than increasing your competence in an activity you love, but how the photo-negative image of that joy is the creeping existential dread that you'll never excel at the activity you love after all. And how the intensities of both the joy and the fear are directly proportional to how much you enjoy or even identify with that activity.

Yesterday I was rambling on about that fear and that joy with regards to roller derby. But this is not primarily a roller derby blog. This is a writing blog. I am a writer. Roller derby may have taken over my life, but writing is my life.

Oddly, that paired joy and fear do not play as blatant a role in my relationship with writing.

I think it's because writing is a lot more... nebulous? Intangible? ...than roller derby is. I can observe with certainty my ability to skate backwards or to positionally block from a sideways stance, and compare my current ability to do these things with my ability last year or the year before. Observing my own improvement in writing is a less sure thing. While I can say that this year I'm sitting down to the keyboard more often, finishing more stories, and making more sales, I can only take it as an item of faith that what comes out of my keyboard when I do sit down is better now than it was in the past. And it's not so much the religious tenet sort of faith as it is the mathematical axiom sort. A + A = 2A. More writing + more reading = better writing.

(No, more sales doesn't necessarily mean better writing. More sales has a lot more to do with submitting more stories more often and to more markets. The axis of saleability is on a separate graph from the axis of quality. Besides, editors aren't just looking for well-written and interesting but also "a good fit with our publication," which you can drive yourself mad trying to plot on a chart.)

So I don't experience so much the joy of watching my skills improve, as I do the satisfaction of watching myself get serious about this "I want to be a writer when I grow up!" thing, treat writing like my day job, and go to work every scheduled workday.

As for the fear/dread/doubt question... no, I don't find myself doubting that I can do this writing thing. Writing is one of those things that I know I can do well. I've proved it to myself over the years. It isn't something like a physical sport where I fight with my body's agility, strength, and reaction time. It's more like... oh, like singing. It's something that to some extent comes naturally to me, something that I've done all my life and have witnessed myself do well at. I've received enough positive feedback on it to be confident I'm not deluding myself here. But unlike singing, writing isn't subject to sudden attacks of stage fright or forgetting the tune/words/harmony/etc. It's not a performance. It's more like architecture. You don't let anyone into the house until you're pretty sure the walls and roof are solid. (And you try not to take it personally if someone notices a windowsill is sagging.)

So, no, it's not my ability to do writing well that I find myself doubting. No. Weirdly, what I angst over is whether I will do it.

Doesn't that sound silly? To be afraid of something that I have total control over preventing from happening? It's as silly as being afraid of the dark while having my hand on the light switch.

And yet that's the shape of my doubt. I fear failing myself. If writing is my life (hyperbole, but a useful one), my fear is getting to the end of that life without having written (and published) the stories I lived to write.

Which I suppose makes my regular workday writing schedule a way of keeping that fear at bay. It's a way of reassuring myself that I've done what I can, today, to prevent an unhappy ending to my story.

That's all I can reasonably ask of myself: That I do, indeed, go to work every scheduled work day. That I don't stand afraid in the dark when I have the power to turn on the light.

Today, I turned on that light.

Tomorrow, I intend to install a brighter light bulb.

Today was all the tired. The pre-lunch session at the farm was weeding crop beds thick with bindweed; the post-lunch session was pruning tomato plants. I came home with a blister from the hula hoe, my arms neon yellow to the elbow from tomato foliage, and the small of my back sunburned quite dramatically from the sagging waistline of my Carhartts utility jeans.

And this the day after we got home from the weekend. Oh, Wyoming. You are so vast, so sunny and hot, so very without shade. Driving across you very nearly made my brain melt and our car overheat. That latter isn't hyperbole; we stopped to change drivers in Wheatland and discovered our radiator fluid was boiling over. That was special.

Saturday morning was relaxing, though. The joy of away bouts is, I'm not responsible for helping set up the track. I'm not expected to help tear down the track and reassemble it on Sunday at our practice location. So I got to sleep late, have a leisurely breakfast, and even take a little reconnaissance walk from the hotel to the afterparty location just to make sure I was familiar with it before I tried it at night, post-bout and post-alcohol. Walking from the Days Inn to Mingles, I went one block too far and found myself at the corner of Wyoming and E-Z Street. I had no idea that Easy Street was in Wyoming. That, also, is special.

You are probably antsy to know how the bout went. I will tell you. We won! The score was 323 to 70, which doesn't begin to tell the play-by-play story. The thing about roller derby bouts is, no matter what the score, every single jam feels like the game depends on it. Every single time you're out there, the intensity is high and the heat is on. Besides, the bout was at an ice hockey venue, using a hockey scoreboard, and there is no hundreds digit on a hockey scoreboard. I had no idea what the score was until it was all over.

("The score is always zero to zero," as my coach will tell you. "Don't even look at the scoreboard until the game is over.")

Also, the track was super slick. We were skating on the polished concrete surface that holds up the ice when the ice rink exists. It made it harder to stop, harder to slow, harder to turn around, and harder for our jammers to push on walls of blockers. Slick floors make for sloppy skating, which makes for more penalties too. Which means each jam was even more of a struggle for dominance, no matter what the scoreboard said.

Now, understand, we're the B travel team that went to Gillette this weekend. Our league's travel teams are filled by twice-yearly try-outs. At try-outs, we're each scored on our skills according to specific metrics. The skaters with the highest scores fill the slots on the "All Stars" A team (our WFTDA charter roster, who, by the way, are going to Division 2 Playoffs in August, and you have the power to help them get there). The next bunch get slotted onto the "Bombshells" B team. Once that fills up, everyone else is placed on the Shrap Nellies C team. At least, that's my understanding of how it works--I don't get to see the scores or the numbers, I just go to try-outs and then practice where they tell me.

I'm explaining this so you'll understand that I was, by actual objective standards, nowhere near the best skater on the track. Our roster included A/B crossover skaters--skaters who skate for both the All Stars and the Bombshells. Our roster included skaters who used to be A/B crossovers but are now full-on All Stars, but who came with us because a week simply isn't enough time to get the new post-try-outs roster ready to bout. I was often on the track with a line-up full of All Stars, and I'm more grateful for it than I can adequately express, because they have taught me so much about how to work with my line and how to communicate and how to hold the jammer and how to be immovable, stable and strong. I've learned so much from them, and I still have so much to learn.

The point is, when the bout is over and the teams come out of their post-bout huddle and announce who they've decided to give the Most Valued Player awards to, when the opposing team says, "And we'd like to give the MVP Blocker award to..." I do not expect to hear my name.

Which is why I stood there like a fool, eyes wide, asking, "You mean me?" And then there were hugs, and congratulations, and pictures, and me crying a little on John's shoulder because I was so stunned and delighted. ("Don't worry," he said. "No one can tell those are tears. You're too full of sweat.") And, oddly, relieved.

I've often said, there are few joys greater than getting to do what you love, than getting better at doing what you love. But I don't always feel like I've got a handle on how much I've improved, or whether I've improved at all. Despite knowing that I can now execute maneuvers I couldn't do last year, and that I'm more stable and have better pack awareness than I used to, there's still doubt. Mistakes often stand out more than triumphs in my head, not least because few of the mistakes go without comment from coaches or teammates. So there's always this half-conscious fear that I'll never be better than mediocre at the game, despite how much I love playing.

But I didn't really understand the extent of all that until Saturday night, when my interior reaction to the award was a huge, overwhelming, and unexpected sense of relief. "Oh, wow, I really am getting better, I really do have the potential to excel at this sport I love playing. Oh, thank goodness." Only then did I realize how much constant background noise of doubt and insecurity I'd been living with.

I'll be attending make-up try-outs this week, having been out of town on the original try-outs date of the 13th. As usual I'll be going into it nervous, aware that I'm capable of screwing it up, and holding no higher expectation than that I simply demonstrate improvement over my results from six months ago.

But maybe this time I'll go into it with somewhat less self-doubt.

The latter half of today was spent entirely on the road, driving to the town of Gillette, Wyoming; the earlier half was spent preparing for the drive. And now we have arrived. John and I are currently at the Old Chicago next door to our hotel, anticipating late night pasta, and tomorrow I will be skating with my Bombshells against the Powder River Rousta Bout It Betties in our single away bout of the season.

That's my excuse for getting no writing done, and I think it's a damn good one. So there.

Driving north across Wyoming was interesting. Visible features of the Colorado/Wyoming border at I-25 include 1) a wind farm, and 2) a camel ranch. After that come the rolling hills forever and ever amen.

"That's the problem with Wyoming," said John. "It's boring. I mean, look! Nothing but boring as far as the eye can see!"

Then about an hour later, somewhere north of Cheyenne, we found ourselves in the Roger Dean dimension of fantastic rock formations. I kept waiting for the dragon-thing from that Asia album to come swimming up out of the Glendo Reservoir.

We very briefly visited Chugwater. Because where else do you refill your water bottles, right? I mean, it's named for good hydration! While we where there, we had ice cream shakes at Wyoming's oldest soda fountain, and I had a cup of the town's famous chili. I can't say whether it is good enough to deserve the hype, but it was exactly what I wanted right at that moment.

By the way. Chugwater? Most awesome-fun-absurd place name to say since that time we passed the I-5 interchange for Chuckanut Drive. Just say it. It's right up there with "Huggbees!" and "It's Spaghetti Time!" for turning your frown upside down.

And with that thought I leave you, as I wander, full of lovely carbs and proteins, back to the hotel and thence to sleep. Wish us luck tomorrow!

I'm pleased to announce that as of today you can read my drabble, "Priesthood Has Its Privileges," on SpeckLit. The other drabble that SpeckLit acquired will appear on the site in September, so stay tuned for that announcement then.

A drabble is a work of fiction that is exactly 100 words long. They are compact and easy to digest, a nutritious part of your daily breakfast. Bookmark SpeckLit to add a new drabble to your diet every other day.

I'm less than pleased to announce that today I was... not as respectful, shall we say, as one should be, of the sharpness of the edge of the scissors blade I was cleaning off. The result is merely a flesh-wound, but there is nothing "merely" about that when it's across your index fingertip and you're trying to type. You ever heard a typo referred to as a "fat finger" incident? Bandaged fingertips are literal fat fingers, hitting two keys where one will do and generally wrecking one's wpms.

Thankfully, this flesh-wound came after a solid session of story revision today. It was solid not only as measured by the formula "butt + chair x time," but also from the standpoint of story problems solved, or at least brought closer to solved. To wit:

1) Raise the stakes. The story has an "OMG shit just got real" moment about halfway through, but I think the draft my friends read suffered from a bit of stall-out after that. The narrator gets home from encountering the "OMG" moment--and almost immediately forgets about it, or at least stops mentioning it, while she listens to some voice mail from her chatty and insufficiently worried friend. So with this revision I'm trying to keep the tension high by correcting both of those oversights. If I've done my job right, I've corrected them both in a single edit to do with what's in the phone message and how the narrator reacts to it.

Wow. That paragraph is a great example of why talking about writing is sometimes not the greatest idea. Trying to discuss a particular edit in generalities rather than specific detail results in hella confusion cum circumlocution. Well, I'm-a leave it up there, let it fend for itself, 'cause I know what I mean, and one day, publishers willing and the markets don't flop, you will too.

2) Everyone's got a story. There is a character in this story more talked about than talking, and it finally occurred to me I have to give him something to do. He's away in a ski resort with the chatty friend, which is to say, they're in what's basically a fancy hotel suite. I visualize it as a kitchen/living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. That's it. Yet the chatty friend manages to leave our narrator phone messages that this other character in the room is not overhearing. How did I solve that problem in recent drafts? Well, apparently I had him taking a lot of naps. This... is not ideal. He is not meant to be the Amazing Hibernating Man. So with this draft I tried to figure out, well, what does he do while they're in the resort? Especially considering the special role he plays in the development of the plot? And how can I then reveal what he's doing such that it lays groundwork for later revelations?

So now he spends a lot of time sitting on the balcony out in the snow, oblivious to the cold, staring out into the storm. Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, but in my head there is a reason. I just have to figure out how to make that reason more clear.

This blog post has been brought to you by a somewhat out of date bottle of New-Skin (R) Antiseptic Liquid Bandage. Protects small cuts without all that bandaged fingertip awkwardness! I think I'll go put on a second coat now. And buy a new, not-out-of-date bottle tomorrow.