author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I've many times sung excited praises of our great new indoors. But the great outdoors in our neighborhood is worth a mention.

First, have I mentioned that we get deer? This first photo is the sight that greeted me when I headed out the door Saturday morning. I saw the tips of the deer's antlers over the half-wall, but it wasn't until I emerged out onto the sidewalk that I realized it wasn't some bush or shrub I'd somehow never noticed before. "Oh, my," is what came out of my mouth. Then I ran back inside and got John. He came out, took one look, and said, "Oh, my." "That's what I said," I said.

John's the one who took the photo. All credit where credit is due.

I'm not sure I've seen a buck in the city with such thick antlers. That and the grizzled look to its face makes me think he's an older animal than I usually see in town. And he just lay there on the lawn, chillin', while neighbors emerged onto the sidewalks and upper walkways to gawk. He didn't get up and leave until the garbage truck thundered into the cul-de-sac. Even then I'd be hesitant to describe his exit as "scared away." It was more like, "What the heck is this noisy thing? What a nuisance! I'm out."

John also took the second photo, which shows off our front patio.

All the first floor units in our building have what I suppose are "privacy walls," based on their apparent purpose being to be shielding the front room's window from the casual glances of passersby. This creates an enclosure which I've referred to as the "front patio" despite that being an overly optimistic description. The space gets perhaps a little sun in the morning; otherwise, it's dim and empty and a little dire. Or at least it was. We were determined to turn it into somewhere pleasant to be.

So we hung up our hanging spaths there on the preexisting hooks that bracketed the window. Then I installed some supports on the privacy wall and hung up some more plants, being careful to choose ones that might flower despite getting very little direct sunlight. (The begonias appear to be doing well. The impatiens in the rectangular box are less enthusiastic, but I hope they'll come around.) And at last, yesterday, we acquired patio furniture.

Now I have an outdoor office!

And these have been our weekend adventures in the great and hyperlocal outdoors.

Hey look! It's last week's fictionette. It's called "Adventures in Posthumous Journalism," which, given Wednesday's blog post, is about what you'd expect. Weird thing is, I never got around to the idea that first kicked things off (the fanatical group that opposes utopias as leading to stagnation). Which is great. The idea that kicked things off was dauntingly huge--like, a novel's worth of worldbuilding--and that wasn't going to fit in under no 1,500 words, unh-uh, no way. Much less threatening to just let the main character make her way through the first scene of that hypothetical novel, mouthing off as she goes. But I thought I might at least get to mention the original idea just a bit before the cut-off. But no.

I should just stop issuing positive statements about timing. Yesterday was worthless. There was no getting things done yesterday. Yesterday I woke up with a headache and a sore back and a sore neck and things didn't so much get better as they got vaguely tolerable, at least tolerable enough to go to scrimmage carrying along with me the even vaguer hope that roller derby cures everything. It cured most things. Everything was a lot less sore afterwards. Well, the big sore things. There were new little sore things, but that's roller derby for you. I'll happily take on new bruises in exchange for getting rid of that sore, tight upper back.

But the moral of the story is, I'm not allowed to say things like "Tomorrow is as late as I'm letting this thing get," because some fool imp in my brain hears that and sabotages it to kablooey.

So I'll say this much: I'm not going to get the June 19 fictionette up over the weekend! My weekend is totally full! It involves a wedding anniversary date at the new drive-in theater in Denver, a sort of roller derby barn raising, a furniture shopping trip, a grocery trip, some various housewarming operations, and quite possibly even more excitement than that. So I'm not even tempted to promise the weekend.

But it'll go up just as soon after that as I possibly can manage.

So things continue to be late over here. But they are getting better! I at least managed to get a solid work session in on the Fictionette that was due out June 12. To no one's surprise, it didn't get done in the car on the way to Nebraska--but I did actually work on it then, which is something. Since then I've been nibbling on it a bit every day. I hoped to have it up by now, but I suppose it will have to be tomorrow. (It had just better be tomorrow. I am not letting it go later than that.)

It's kind of a dark one, involving a terrorist plot and a tragic death. I honestly wasn't looking forward to writing it. This is what happens if I don't get my freewriting done every day; when it's time to choose one to turn into a Fictionette, I don't have lots of choices, and I wind up having to choose the one that's the least bad. And comforting myself that I won't have to Fictionette it up until this week next month. Then "this week next month" turns into this week and I'm all, er. Really? This is what I assigned myself? Oh, hell.

I've been warming up to it over the week, though, especially since I decided the narrator would be the dead person. Writing from the point of view of a ghost, especially one who's not letting death stop her from becoming a great journalist, is kinda fun. Interesting, at least.

I don't even remember which of the freewriting sessions from this week last month is scheduled to become the June 19 Fictionette. I haven't even looked at it. Gah.

Which is not to say this hasn't been a productive week! It has! I've been more-or-less sticking to my daily plans for writing. But it's just been slow, not least because there's all this other stuff to be productive about. We've been cleaning up, rearranging stuff, and retrieving things from the rented storage unit. Also shopping for hardware. John has been slowly converting our storage closet downstairs into an honest-to-goodness workshop; to that end, he has brought back from Home Depot an honest-to-goodness workbench. Also an AC outlet that stacks into a lightbulb socket. Tomorrow or the next day, the boards-and-brick-bookshelves come home. (They won't be enough, especially since some of them are going into the storage closet, to better organize our storage. We need more bookshelves. One over there, and one over there, and also one out there.) Then Sunday, we just might, for the first time in our lives, become the proud owners of patio furniture.

And yet, with all this going on (and roller derby too), I somehow found time to post to File770.com a filk of half of Rush's "Freewill" on the topic of the Sad/Rabid Puppy Hugos Ballot Takeover of 2015. Because it got in my head and wouldn't leave, OK? These things happen! ...What?

Maybe I need sleep.

There are no wrong decisions. This is very important to remember. I keep forgetting, which causes me no end of problems until I remember it again.

For a little while, I was working through the exercises in Creativity Rules! (A Writer's Workbook) by John Vorhaus. I never made it all the way through the book. Partially due to a feeling that the exercises were becoming less relevant to my particular practice, and partially due to some irreconcilable issues I came to have with the author's perspective, I fell out of the habit and eventually put the book aside.

Nevertheless, that book did introduce me to a couple of eternal verities that I have tried to hold onto. To wit:

• All writing is good writing. Any writing is more writing than you had before.
• Today's goal: Be a better writer than I was yesterday.
• Writing means deciding, often arbitrarily, between infinite possibilities.
• There are no wrong decisions.

It's that last bit I have to keep remembering. Of late, my freewriting sessions have devolved into circumlocution when they ought to be zeroing in on specifics. "The main character investigates too closely into some mystery," I'll write, "which results in he or she uncovering a Terrible Truth which they will always wish they'd never learned." OK, fine, but what's the mystery? What's the truth? Who is the character?

And that's where I'll stall out--I don't want to make any decisions. I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision. I'll write myself into a corner. I won't know what I'm writing about. If the mystery and the terrible truth involve a corporate outfit, I'll trip over my total ignorance of corporate culture. If it's an IT environment, my memory of how that goes is more than ten years outdated. And that's before I consider the implications of what gender I make the main character, or what economic background, or what their particular role is in the environment where they are investigating the mystery, and...

And paralysis.

Which is silly, because, as I must constantly remind myself, there are no wrong decisions. Any decision leads to story. Different decisions lead to different stories. And no decision is final! Sure, each decision narrows the possibilities available within any one story. Once I decide to make the main character a trust-fund baby used to getting his own way at his father's bank, I no longer have the option of making her a woman who has clawed her way out from poverty and up the corporate latter. But after writing for twenty-five minutes about the banker's son, I can open up a new blank document, reset my timer, and write for twenty-five minutes about the self-made woman. Different decisions lead to different stories, and I can write them all.

So I just have to remind myself: Angst over arbitrary decisions is just another way to put off the actual act of writing. It's one of the sneaky ways Resistance and Avoidance manage to crash the productivity party. The moment I notice that I'm writing around the story idea instead of writing it down, that's when I need to convert all that circumlocution into a game of Mad Libs. "[Character] investigates [mystery] in [some corporate environment] and discovers [the horrible truth]... OK, make that 'college intern,' 'weekly meetings she's not invited to,' and 'demonic invocation.' Go! ... OK, now let's try it again with 'newly appointed interim director,' 'shameful inefficiencies concerning environmental studies,' and 'deaths being covered up in appalling numbers'. Wait, doesn't that sound kind of familiar? Who cares, play with it anyway."

Point is, it's a game of fill-in-the-blanks, and there are no wrong answers. Fill in the blanks more or less at random. Write about the results, in good faith and with actual scenes and characters and details. Then fill the blanks again, and write those scenes and characters and details.

Every decision is the right decision, so long as it's the "write" decision.

...And there's your cheesy inspirational slogan for the week. You're welcome!

...and tomorrow it's going to take the wheel. We have an eight hour drive ahead of us, followed by quite possibly a visit to the National Museum of Roller Skating (if we get to Lincoln in time, which is, alas, not likely) and, if we've still got any energy, a session of recreational rolling around at the Skate Zone (which is pretty definite).

And then we'll be competing against the No Coast Derby Girls on Saturday. Which is the whole point of the trip.

I'm also looking at composing and publishing the June 2015 Week 2 Friday Fictionette in the car. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to count on that. Well, that was before the week got squandered on--well, this and that. Mostly this, a little of that. We'll see.

And what about Week 1? Well, it's up. Finally. "You Could Go a Long Way in Those Shoes" is kind of comedy, kind of horror, and kind of vaguely influenced by having recently read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The writing prompts for the original freewriting session were "Underground Railroad" and "cleats." It wound up having much to do with the importance of good running shoes in scoping out the possibilities of a cross-continental subterranean passenger railroad system.

I'm undecided whether the world of this fictionette is fantasy or science fiction. It's comparable to present day Earth in many ways, including the technological, but the entire continent which provides the story's setting has sort of a basement floor. I toyed with the idea of making it a post-space-colonization planet, but I was honestly too lazy to come up with any concrete details about the history of space travel and the future tech they'd have to have. So it's more sort of an alternate Earth on an alternate North America with less urban sprawl. (Which seems like a plot hole. There'd be a very good incentive for urban centers to sprawl all about the place, as you will see.) In any case, I'd like to write more in this setting, once I know a little bit more about the setting.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I met one of my goals with the June 5 fictionette: It's not just a story-like object. It's actually a complete story. Enjoy!

This week is going to be a tight week for me, even if I'm scrupulous about my schedule and use every hour to its fullest. The work days are squeezed between two extremely full derby weekends, with mid-year travel team try-outs just behind and a double-header in Nebraska coming up. Thus Friday will find me on the road all day long. This time I know better than to expect writing to happen in the car.

Knowing that, I still managed to be late with the June 5 Friday Fictionette. It's coming, it's imminent, it's been drafted--it's just that if I stay up until all hours finishing it tonight, I reduce my chances of getting all my work done tomorrow. Schedule scrupulosity cannot happen if I eff up the whole bed-by-one, up-by-eight thing. So.

I haven't got its title yet--my hope is that will come to me in my sleep--but it's about a sort of science fiction/fantasy version of David Moffat, whose proposed railroad will cross under the continental divide rather than over it. And there will, for once, actually be an ending rather than a cliffhanger to nowhere. Rejoice!

More tomorrow. Must engage in bedtime procedures right now.

A recipe! Which epiphanized out of a conversation on the drive home from roller derby practice. Sort of a rolling sequence of epiphanies: "Oh, yeah! Shepherd's pie! That exists, doesn't it? Such that I can actually make it! Hey! I actually have all the ingredients at home right now! I am so very much making it tonight."

OK, well, I did not in fact have mutton on hand. I had ground beef. Perfectly acceptable.

The rest of the conversation involved us collaborating on a recipe, which I proceeded to polish into practicality the moment I got home. It wound up going something like this:

About a pound of russet potatoes. Put them in to boil. Their fate is to be mashed.

1 pound ground beef. Defrost it in the microwave. (I have a microwave now. Haven't had one in about 15 years.) Brown in a pan. No oil or butter - just let its own juices do the work. When there's only a small amount of raw pink left, remove the meat to another container, leaving the fatty juices in the pan.

1 medium onion, or half a large one. 3 ribs celery. Sautee these in the burger juices until soft and, optionally, caramelized around the edges.

A good handful parsley, chopped. A good fingerful minced garlic out the jar. Splashes soy sauce, worchestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar to taste. Salt and pepper to taste. Stir into the ground beef while the aromatics are sauteeing.

About as many frozen peas as looks right when you mix it into the ground beef mixture. Probably about a cup. If it looks like it needs more, add more. You know what kind of peas-to-meat ratio you like. Make it happen.

Three scallions, chopped. Heavy whipping cream as needed for creamy texture. However much shredded parmesan cheese you like. Another good fingerful of minced garlic. These are what go into the potatoes, when you mash your potatoes. Well, when I mash my potatoes, anyway. I leave the skins on, by the way.

Spread meat mixture in an even layer on bottom of 9 x 13 baking pan. Pyrex-style is best; you want to be able to see through the sides. Spread mashed potatoes in an even layer on top. Make fun designs in the top of the mashed potatoes with a fork.

Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or until it's been bubbling up from the bottom of the pan for a good few minutes. (This is why I like see-through baking pans.)

Move pan to top rack, set oven to a high broil, and broil for about 5 minutes or until the mashed potatoes have got a nice golden-brown crust on them. This will make your fun fork designs stand out nicely.

Let cool for about ten minutes or until you can't stand it anymore. Devour. Accompany with a delicious dark beer if you do that sort of thing. I do that sort of thing. It's a Tommyknocker Cocoa Porter.

Today was one of those fresh summer days that wants to come in through every window. I opened up the patio door and the office window, which have screens. I opened up the front door, which, oddly, doesn't; it has something I want to call a screen door, but it has no actual screens in it. It has three glass panels. I figured out how to slide one of them up, but, again, there's no screen. One must choose between air in or bugs out. One cannot have both, at least not until I install a screen or just replace the door.

Replacing the "screen" door would probably be fine. Its latch is broken, too, such that it's difficult to get it to latch shut from the inside and entirely impossible from the outside.

Nevermind! The fresh summer day came in by the patio door and the office window, and extra light came in by the not-really-a-screen-door, and I found the energy to get some household chores done. Laundry, dishes, taking out the recyclables. Topping off the bird feeder. Attempting to rescue spinach seedlings that got dug up in the night, probably by that jerk the squirrel. (Seriously, I need to just bring all the plants in overnight. This is ridiculous.)

I even took a rag and some lemon oil and my spinning wheel outside, and I made a first pass at cleaning off the storage unit grime. All the dust came off, but there are stubborn stains on the treadles, probably from years of having that little bottle of spinning wheel oil hanging upside and dripping onto them. Still, some progress was made. At least the poor thing is no longer gross to handle.

What I'd really like to do is invite fiber-geek friends over and have a little spin-in on that front patio. Now that the summer heat has reached us, it's no longer a dim and freezing cold dungeon. But it's not so full of sun as to be wearying, either. And I've got happy little shade-tolerant plants hanging out there, the decade-old spaths and the new baskets of impatiens and begonias. It would be lovely to sit out there and sip tea and spin yarn (literally) and also spin yarns (figuratively).

Alas, I didn't get to any spinning today. Nor the piano. Mostly I spent the afternoon fighting with Patreon's new input interface while turning "Because You Weren't There" into the May 2015 Fictionette Freebie. The new interface is, in theory, a great improvement over the old. Not only can you input rich text via HTML now, but you can also upload new attachments to, and change out the image of, an existing creation. (You couldn't do that before. I KNOW.) However, there's a bug such that depending on the click path you use to get to the edit interface, the "save" button might not actually save your changes. That is, if you click through to a single post view, and then click Edit, you're fine. But if you click the Edit button attached to the post where it appears as an item in your posts stream, it will be a no-go.

But the post I wanted to edit--the plain-text excerpt of the Fictionette--I had created through the Activity Stream interface rather than through the Creations interface. Which isn't a distinction that ought to matter, since the new interface files both of them under "Creator Posts" as opposed to "All Posts" (that is, posts you posted, or messages your Patrons posted to you). But it matters this much: Posts created under the Activity Stream rubric appear to no longer have an Edit button within the single post view. I can only get in to edit them via the button on the item in the posts stream. Which click path, as I said, leads to a non-functional Save Post button.

Also, have I mentioned that since the interface update, some Patron-only posts got set to Accessible By Everyone? And probably vice versa? Pardon me while I go double-check the status of every single item in my archive since September 2014. Whee.

Finally, after beating my head against that brick wall for far too long, I struck a compromise. I gave up on trying to edit the post, and just created a whole damn new one, with the full text in HMTL and the links to the PDF and MP3 and also the announcement that it was now free for all to download regardless of your pledge tier or Patron status. And I emailed Patreon's support staff with the bug report, which hopefully isn't too rambling for them to understand. The above two paragraphs should give an idea of whether I succeeded; the email was more rambling than that, I fear. Then, at last, I turned my attention to Other Matters.

Which, it being now an hour until I had to leave for roller derby practice, meant things like getting into my derby clothes, cooking myself dinner, packing up my skate gear, and things like that.

Here's hoping tomorrow's work day doesn't get whittled away by technological frustrations like today's did. And that I get all the things done. And still get time to spin yarn and practice piano and maybe play a little on Puzzle Pirates too. And read blogs. And go for a long walk around Sale Lake. And...

Optimism! It's what's for midnight snackies!

On the occasion of Shuttles Spindles Skeins's monthly spin-in-and-knit-in, I brought home my spinning wheel and fiber stash from our rented storage unit. Some of the fiber appears to have sustained new moth activity, so none of it's coming into the house until I've had a chance to evaluate, treat, and adequately store each individually. Until then, it stays in our storage closet in the parking garage.

Exception #1: My portion of the brown fleece off Sheepfeathers Farm's "Daphne" seems to have escaped the moths' hunger entirely. I pawed through it and found no visible eggs, "confetti" debris, or broken fibers. Still, it was stored close to the other fibers, so it gets put into several gallon-sized resealable bags, and they go inside a lidded plastic bin of their own.

Exception #2: What is left of the half-fleece of black lamb's wool (probably CVM) after I discovered moths in it last year, I've felt confident assuming it's clean of moths now. This is because at the time of the moth discovery, I went into emergency anti-month action. All the bits that had been chewed on got thrown into the compost. What remained, about three-fourths of the original amount of wool, got washed in very hot water. Then it all went out on the balcony to dry and then to freeze and thaw repeatedly at the mercy of the incoming winter. Then it all got put into a big black plastic bag, which got aggressively tied closed. As the bag had no holes in it that I could find, I presumed the wool clean enough to take to the spin-in without endangering others' fiber.

Discovering moths in fiber that I'd last touched months or even years ago is doubly distressing. First off, I paid good money for that wool, I maybe already put good effort into washing it and spinning it, and I had plans for its potential. That potential has now been trashed, or at least significantly curtailed. Secondly, it feels like a rebuke: "If you'd only washed and spun and knit me sooner, instead of procrastinating like you always do, this wouldn't have happened." (The parallel with long-neglected writing projects is an exercise left to the reader.)

Taking action helps. Spinning a good ten or fifteen locks of the black lamb at the spin-in tonight, that helps. Bringing the fiber home and enacting a plan to treat and store it all correctly, that helps too. Deciding that I will spin Every! Single! Day! helps, too, but is probably overly optimistic of me. I haven't actually practiced the piano since bringing the bench home from repair. But I could if I wanted to! And now that the spinning wheel and drop-spindles are home, spinning is a possibility too.

Bunch of other things came home: more sheet music, a couple boxes of T-shirts and jeans waiting to be turned into quilts, all but one of the musical instruments, and a couple of boxes of Random Things. I'm daunted by how much is still in there, though. When we were in the throes of house-moving, we promised ourselves we'd clear out of the rented storage unit in six weeks. But it took us six weeks just to feel like we'd put enough stuff away to justify bringing more stuff into the house. So we're behind schedule on it. So what else is new.

But the spinning wheel is home. So is the majority of the sheet music. These things make me happy.

So I took today off. It's the fifth Friday; I get to do that on fifth Fridays. Especially in the case of a day completely without scheduled obligations and nobody home but me. I pretty much slept until I woke up, then grabbed a book of Cordwainer Smith short stories and read myself back to sleep. It was glorious.

In between short stories, there were breaks for watching grackles raid the bird feeder. The bird feeder is the sort with a nut-and-seed compartment in the middle and suet cake compartments on either side. The grackles like the suet cakes, especially the one that came labeled "no-melt formula." They have a Method. It goes something like this:

1. Land on the roof to scout out the scene.
2. Announce intentions via a single chirp/croak.
3. Flap over to the feeder and stuff beak as full as possible with suet cake crumbs.
4. Flap down to railing or floor of balcony to spit out the loot.
5. Eat the loot daintily from this secondary location.
6. Except for the last crumb, which they will take away with them into the trees.

Basically, they're like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet who still get to take leftovers home in the doggie bag. It's hilarious. I love watching them strut around the balcony, all crow-like, full of exaggerated decorum.

The house finches are hilarious, too, especially when they arrive in groups, scolding and fluttering at each other in a mobile, airborne quarrel. They look like they're fighting over who gets the best spot on the feeder. They may also be engaging in their typical mating ritual, which as far as I can tell involves the male finch showing off how fantastically red his head and butt are, and the female finch demonstrating how fantastically fed up with him she is.

Sparrows show up less frequently and act a little shy. They're more easily scared off by my movements inside the house, and they give way to the finches without argument. Strikes me as weird, considering that most of my interactions with sparrows involve them mobbing my feet on outdoor patios at cafes and demanding to know whether I'm done with that muffin.

And then there's this little tiny bird, maybe two-thirds the size of a sparrow, that I still haven't managed to get a good look at yet. It makes an aggrieved, high-pitched, descending "peep!" noise and hops around the tree branches with a movement that reminds me of the way woodpeckers hop around on tree trunks. It has a relatively thin tail for its size, which is all I can see when it's on the other side of the bird feeder from me. The moment I try to get a better view, that sucker is gone.

So that's about all I've been doing today. Reading, watching birds, eating leftovers, and fighting off that vague sense of guilt for not having spent today Getting Things Done. It has been long and arduous, that fight, but I think I am winning.