#(by full of holes i mean that one panel is mostly hole and some stray fabric)

[blinkbones]

it was a great idea to mend my bedsheet with sashiko* embroidery until it is two weeks later and i am really itching to change my sheets and im still not done not even first pass

*according to online osmosis, not fact checked

[originaldetectivesheep]

A Life of Riley Part 2: The Building That Had A Grudge Against Furniture Or Something ch 5

Chapter 4

V

If you were desperately looking for an upside in this stupid goddamned mess that we had gotten ourselves into, like we were, the fact that Riley showed up with the blueprints and the coveralls and an explanation before the backhoe started tearing up the lawn and the sidewalk and half the garage access would count as a small blessing.  It was a real, real, real small one, though, because we barely had time to get changed and get down to the machine room before the heavy construction equipment started off on a tear practically right under our windows.  "Riley, is that your bulldozer?" I asked, pulling my hair back into a ponytail and tucking the end into the collar of my cheap gray jumpsuit.  "Because I thought we were just going to be working here in the machine room – why is the whole front of the condos getting torn up?"

"Partly," Riley said, spreading out a large-scale architectural blueprint of the complex across a wilting half-ping-pong table that Remy and Yuping had salvaged from somewhere, "because without a big-ass distraction out front, people might notice the stuff we're loading down in here, partly because we need to reuse the culvert that the stream we're moving is routed through right now, and partly because daylighting that dumb creek that got buried for this place makes the perfect cover story for all the other construction we're going to be doing.  Just think about it for a second: this place is losing money hand over fist, and what gets all those hipsters that hang around the architecture school wishing they had the math scores to get in or the daddy's-money to major in urban planning wetter faster than daylighting every random inch-wide open sewer anyone can dig up on a map from a hundred years ago?  It's exactly the kind of twee-ass friggin thing that developers would lean into to save a place like this, and they're going to be dragging in so much crap to build up their Disneyland landscaped storm drain that people won't pay any attention to a few more crates into the machine room." Riley traced out the proposed daylighting course, and marked how it connected to the existing culvert – a culvert that as far as I could tell was running nearly under our feet here.

"Okay," I said, "and if they're going to get a nice water feature out of it I can see why the developers would be paying for it, but there was something else there – why the culvert?  What do we need that for?" There was a clatter behind me, and I turned around to see Leo bent over, breathing hard, a regiment's worth of picks and sledgehammers and stuff with their heads on the floor and their handles leaned on his stooped shoulders; behind him, Carolína was staggering down the stairs with an armload of what looked like crowbars and mortar-spreaders.

"You're not going to like this, Saj," Riley said through a grim-set jaw, "but this one is going to be friggin complicated.  I thought when we first took this that it was going to be another hyperfold, like that accident with the disnub phlogistihedron or whatever that Carolína got stuck in last term – and that some idiot was running around on a collapsed infinite lattice and it only looked like someone was messing around with the state space.  In that case, it woulda been simple: you get someone into it, someone like you or Remy who can throw a punch if they gotta, and then mark out the anchor points, use the dislocator to reachieve continuity, and the friggin hyperfold will unfold itself – three-space doesn't want to get crumpled up like that, so if you just get the right quantum hammer out, shit will tend to fix itself." I nodded, but tentatively; I remembered that stupid thing with Riley's old wackadoodle roommate and his impossible origami polyhedron, and how Carolína had gotten stuck outside of reachable three-dimensional space for most of three days when she went back over – and now that was supposed to have been the easy, simple, normal case of whatever Riley was now considering to be 'complicated'.  This was going to suck – even worse than it did already.

"From everything that I've been able to pick up around here, though," Riley said, tossing a welding glove hand to hand to vaguely imply the room and the condo complex around us, "there's nothing folded up here.  Now, that doesn't mean there's no fold – all it means is that I can't judge the fold, which points to a fold, if there is one, which is still the simplest friggin explanation, that involves the fucking q axis instead of or in addition to some subset of x-y-z that isn't the full set and thus detectable by normal three-space physics tools." Riley snorted and threw the glove onto the table.  "So at a minimum we have, in that case, an agency that either can make a fold in q, which we can't, or an agency that's gotten stuck in a maybe-accidental fold in q and is twiddling its goddamned thumbs there eating people's microwaves."  Riley turned back to me; probably Leo and Carolína had already gotten this spiel while I was struggling with how these coveralls were cut in the hips.  "I'm doing a poll: what do you call an agent that can move in q?"

I gave Riley a look.  "Everyone moves in q – we're all moving in q right now."

"We're moving along q, and that makes all the difference in the world."  Riley picked up the glove again; there was some kind of a beeping upstairs, like someone was backing a heavy truck in.  "We move along q through hyperspace with all the rest of the x-y-z complex; I'm talking an agent, potentially an intelligent agent, that moves in time like we can go left-right forward-back up-down.  If something is taking the lamps and couches, rather than them falling through holes in three-space – which, I remind you, don't exist as such because whatever fold there is or isn't here isn't hitting all three of our normal axes – then that's per se a higher-order intelligent being. Not more intelligent, not superman-superior – but something that's as different from us and as alien to our way of thinking as we are to a goddamned pencil sketch."

"So you do think there's a ghost or a god or a demon here," I said, not sure what to believe.

Riley shrugged.  "Call it what you like; that's what I was asking for. But a rose by any other name would still got its needs: and that's what we need the culvert for, the culvert and these tools – and Remy and Yuping, when they can start getting goddamned down here with the dislocator assemblies."  Riley bent over, squinting around and up the stairs; the guys obviously still hadn't unloaded those parts from the truck or whatever.

"I'm sorry, Riley," I said again, "but I still don't follow."

Riley gave up on the stairs and sauntered back to the parabola valleys of the dying ping-pong table.  "So after I reasoned out that we had a probably higher-order entity here, something with agency in q, I did some thinking; you should never, when you run into a new observation or a new principle in science, assume that just because this is the first time somebody noticed it, it's the first time in the history of the goddamned universe that it's happened.  So I thought, okay, we've got a higher-order agency here, and we obviously can't credit everything in folklore because humans are huge liars all the damn time and stories spread, but what do people pretend to know about these kinds of intelligences?  Gods or demons or spirits or ghosts or what the hell ever all over the world, you strip off all the paint and stage dressing, and what do you got?  That you can make deals with them under the right circumstances, and they like it when you give them stuff.  Offerings, sacrifices; there's always a way to cut a deal. So what I'm betting is that whatever's stuck in this fold we can't find or unfold here will respond within those parameters once we get it nailed down, and that we can offer it a better deal than it got from whatever orisha got evicted to put up your little party pad."

"You're going to renegotiate the demon's contract?" I asked; this was if anything getting less clear.  "How?  With what?"

"How, yeah, I'm still working on that," Riley said, scratching at a stray neck pimple.  "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."  A super reassuring sentence from someone who'd just admitted the likelihood of higher-dimensional intelligences.  "But with what, that's fuckin' easy.  Everything back to the book of goddamned Genesis is on board: these things want live flesh instead of dead planks.  There's no way this thing's going to keep eating its last contract's endtables and TV stands when we can pipe it straight in grinckles." Grinckles.  Again.  Of course.  The culvert, the stream – the fish had been mostly driven off campus, but not out of town, and now were were going to be driving them in here into the basement to buy off a demon.  I took a moment, squatting down, double facepalming like that was going to help, as the top of the stairs rattled and the others moved out of the way to let Yuping and Remy start bringing the quantum-state dislocator down piece by piece.

The first parts down, though, weren't the familiar controls or even the containment-cell panels that had been the biggest culprits in how there was no space in the lab for the longest time.  It was me and Carolína putting them together as the guys dragged them down, and what was emerging out of the greasy machine parts was, at least to start, a gigantic bank of extremely-high-voltage pass-through capacitors: a power supply assembly that was more on the scale of a railgun to launch spaceships than anything we'd ever built in the lab…yet.  "Riley," I asked, locking the ears of a mains plug in place and then turning the screws down to make sure that the connection was secure, "is this really safe?  This is a lot more potential power than we've ever put through the dislocator before – are you sure this is going to work, and not just melt down all around us?"

Riley squinted through the eyepiece of a short-legged transit, checking the level or the range to the back wall or something, and stood up with a snort.  "If it slags, it slags; not that much we can do about it."  Remy and Leo were coming down the stairs with a tall, heavy chunk of steel and glass – one of the panels for the dislocator's containment cell – and Riley moved out of the way, motioning them towards the far wall.  "One of the things about the physical universe, though, is that if you want something out of it, you can generally do it if you dump in enough energy to get it past its moment of inertia.  I'm betting that there's a fold somewhere around in here, like I was saying, and if we can throw enough giga-electron-volts through it, we can pin it back a little, even if it's partway on q. Yeah, it's not exact, but if we wanted to be sure and theoretically perfect and delicate with our energy budgets, we'd be up sipping tea with the string-theory bozos in Wetmore Hall.  This is Applied Physics – as the founder of our discipline said back a couple thousand years ago, give us a lever and a place to stand and we'll move the world.  It's just that this lever, if we really rigged it up for pure throughput, could pull enough juice to brown out the friggin Three Gorges."  Riley paused for a moment, admiring the technological terror we were putting back together in our condo's basement.

"But yeah, the contain on this is probably going to be pretty sloppy.  If you had anything important, you'd probably want to put in a Faraday cage – like up on campus, though; you'd probably need a 150-millimeter lead castle down here.  And it would've been smarter to do it yesterday, before I started pulsing around with the small unit off the truck; anyway, just worry about getting those capacitor cells lined up and drawing out of the mains.  We're not going to be able to make necessary throughput off the power the city can get us through those wires – what we get from the power supplies is easily ninety percent of our uptime."  Behind Riley, Leo and Yuping were settling another containment panel in place; I could be wrong, but it sure looked like Riley's big plan for finding or contacting this demon was to ramp up as much power through the quantum-state dislocator as possible and hope it wandered into the beam.  That was fine as a dumb hypothesis went, but the last time that we tried to overvolt the dislocator like that, something in the power supply failed, and nearly burned a hole in the floor – and that was with only one of these mega-capacitance cells.

"Right, if the shielding's up and all the power's drawing, then as soon as we can get the friggin beam housing down, Sajitha and Carolína will get it coupled in and check all the connections and software while Remy and Leo go knock a hole in the culvert and wedge the goddamn fish grate in.  Bira, that dude that Sandra's got running the construction crew, says they've got water into the surface cut; that's all we need, the fish'll go up that way until we can get the lures and crap in." Riley flipped through some papers on top of the blueprints, checking on something.  "Yuping and I will bring in the beam as soon as the generator head is on line, then Yuping, you have to go and get the rest of the stuff together."  Yuping nodded, but with a roll of his eyes, like whatever that 'rest of the stuff' Riley was putting on him was so dumb and unnecessary that even he would push back on it.  I raised my hand.

"Riley, if we need to move fast I can help dig.  We've already gotten all the power connections together, and I'm buffer than Leo, and he's nearly as good as Carolína at equipment ops.  Wouldn't that be easier?"

Riley shut me down with an upheld hand. "No, Saj, I need you in here to bring the beam in, in case I have to hop on something else while Yuping's out collecting the crutches and our fish specialist."  Yeah, that was pretty goddamned stupid, and it totally explained why he didn't want to do it.  "Just do your job and get the equipment up and running; you can let Leo go and get sweaty with Remy just this once.  You'll have all the time you like once this shit's done and you can be sure the mattress isn't going to bamf out from under you." I gritted my teeth as Riley turned back away to check something in the containment panels; Remy's eyes met mine as he and Leo set down the main beam generator module, and he quickly turned away before coming around to a half-look back.

"Say, thanks, Sajitha, even – I –"

"Save it," Riley cut across, pointing at the pile of rock-breaking tools randomly stacked around the foot of the stairs.  "Hands, move; you've got two feet of concrete between the wall and the culvert to get chunked out.  I need live fish and a hot beam, and until we got those, you can keep your hands to yourselves and your parts in your pants."  Remy took up a pick in his left hand and a sledgehammer almost effortlessly in his right; he looked back at me – Riley was checking something else on the blueprints and talking up at probably the construction foreman by phone – as he turned for the other door towards the room closest to the culvert, but I stayed ducked down, working on hooking up the main dislocator module, not looking for his gaze.  It wasn't that there was anything there – not that there hadn't been all the way along, which was nothing, of course.  There wasn't anything wrong about wanting to watch Remy's muscles working, back and shoulders and arms slinging a pick to smash through and break the rock apart, to chip in on my own controlling a heavy hammer and show him that I could handle myself, handle some of the physical work once in a while; nothing that ought to get Carolína smiling like that at least.

I closed up the interconnect and booted the dislocator controls off the on-board battery, making sure that it wouldn't be exposed to the capacitor cells until Riley was ready to go for the big time.  If this stupid thing could just work, and solve the appliance disappearances, and additionally not set everything on fire and wipe every hard drive for eight blocks around; if it could just work correctly without somehow getting even stranger, then Riley and Carolína and whoever could ride me and Remy up and down and back and forward about whatever dumb not-happening relationship they liked.  If it could just work.

Chapter 6

[abrutledge]

The Incredible True Story of How Ben Stiller and a Ukulele Changed My Life

I guess I will begin this blog by telling you about my journey to publishing so far, which begins with a ukulele. Or, no. Depending on how far back you want to go, my path to getting a book deal actually begins with me taking major life advice from a Ben Stiller movie.

It was January 1st, 2014. Somehow the husband (who will hereafter be referred to as Sensitive Man because, trust me, he is) and I managed to both have the day off from work. And it was a holiday, at that! We decided to head out of town to do some shopping and catch a movie. On the drive, I checked my phone to see what was playing. Not much, but there was a movie based on a short story I'd read and sort of liked in high school: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. So we saw that.

I loved it. I wasn't expecting to love it. I thought it'd be silly and pointless like a lot of Ben Stiller comedies, but it's kind of inspiring. It's about a daydreamer finding the courage to go after all the things he really wants. Most notably for me, though, was that a big chunk of the movie takes place in Iceland.

At that point in my life, I'd been daydreaming about my own trip to Iceland for about two years. I'd also been writing for about two years. They're connected, you see. The first novel--well, really the first anything--I'd ever written was a YA Fantasy that takes place in a fictionalized version of Iceland. So, there I was watching this movie about a very anxious man taking a big risk and going to this place that I knew I really wanted to go. I had traveled extensively within the United States as a child, but not so much as an adult. Actually, going out of the country sort of terrified me. Lots of things do. But I wanted to be like Walter and DO THE THING. So I decided right then in a movie theater on New Year's Day that I was going to Iceland.

And I did. Four months later I spent the week of my 30th birthday in Iceland. It was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that when I came home and friends would ask me about my trip, I couldn't quite find the words for it. I kept it to myself, for the time being anyway.

Fast forward another year. January 1st, 2015. Another New Year's Day and I was feeling less than inspired. I had been working on the same book for three years and I still didn't have it figured out. I'd crossed an ocean to try and find the missing pieces of this book and it was becoming a bigger mess each time I made a trip to the keyboard. That's it. I'm out, I thought. Writing is not for me. I'm kind of a serial craft-hopper, skipping from one creative hobby to the next. In the past I've been a photographer, a zinester, a knitter, an art journal instructor... the list goes on. So, even though I kind of liked writing, I felt so stuck that I decided the best thing for me would be to find a new creative outlet. So, I bought a ukulele.

My uke is super cute. It's pinkish purple. Or purple-ish pink? And the sound hole is heart shaped. When I pick it up I feel like a curvy girl version of Zooey Deschanel, complete with giant bangs and kitschy dresses (it's a running joke with Sensitive Man that I'm his manic pixie dream girl). Hooooowever, I couldn't play this instrument. Or any others. I suck at music things. Always have, always will. And it's not for lack of trying. I practiced my ukulele for an hour every day for two months and saw zero improvement. I wanted to learn how to play "Little Talks" but by the end of it, all I could do with my ukulele was scare off stray cats. 

I repeat, zero improvement. 

And, so, out of sheer creative desperation, I started writing again. A different book this time. The YA Fantasy Book of My Heart still exists, mostly finished but mostly flawed. The new book I started working on is about a lot of things that matter quite a bit to me, but mostly I think it's about finding the courage to keep going after something so horrible happens that it seems the calendar should have just stopped and you should have just crumbled to dust, but you didn't and so now what? It is also about a very anxious person taking their first trip out of the country--to Iceland. This was a very personal story that I wrote mostly at three in the morning when there was nothing for me to do but get up out of bed and let it out. 

It took me three months to write Miles Away from You. And at the end of it, I had this thing that I loved so much that I entered it into a pitch contest. First draft. Big no-no. Actually, an even bigger admission here is that I wasn't even done with MAFY when I entered the contest. I had a full draft, but it was only 45,000 words, which does not a novel make. Still, I thought, eh I can squeeze out 5,000 more words to at least make it novel length. When I was looking over the contest mentor list, I saw a picture of beautiful dark-haired girl in a cute dress, surrounded by a stack of books. Just looking at Alana Saltz's picture made me want to be her friend. I was sure she was destined to be my mentor. And even though I'm painfully shy, I decided to reach out to her on Twitter. Over the next few weeks we talked about our shared love of Francesca Lia Block, and about ukuleles--I'd learned she played the uke from her blog. And then the big day came. Out of around 2,000 people, I was one of twenty chosen by a Pitch to Publication mentor. Alana loved my novel and wanted to work with me! I laughed out loud when in her email she said one of the reasons she'd chosen me was because of our little ukulele talks on Twitter. I knew I picked up that darn thing for a reason!

Alana and I scrubbed and polished my manuscript, adding another ten thousand words and tidying up my ramblings. I had to learn to use tracking changes and how to properly format a manuscript for the first time. Then, the scariest thing ever--presenting my novel to a panel of agents. In the first few days, I didn't get any bites. Alana and I were bummed. She promised to help me compile a list of other agents to send it out to. I quietly wondered to myself if I'd ever get up the courage to actually do that. This contest had taken up so much of my mental energy and suddenly we'd tanked. Then, finally, I got a request. And then another! With shaky hands, I sent my full to the agents. The first sent me a really encouraging rejection. She loved the novel, but not enough to take it on. And the second, Moe Ferrara of BookEnds, wanted to do a phone call. Phone calls are good. Phone calls mean the agent probably wants to represent you. I should have been happy. Except that phone calls are my worst enemy.

I'm shy. Not the normal, cute kind of shy. I have the kind of life-ruining social anxiety that makes it impossible for me to do normal things like make doctor appointments, use a drive-thru, or ace a job interview. If I'm nervous, my brain and my mouth disconnect completely. I can't say the things I want to say, and I can't stop myself from saying stupid things, either. I told Moe via email that she could call me, but that I'm shy. I hadn't quite learned yet to explain my shyness further. The bad news was that I was about to go to Chicago for a music festival and didn't have time for a phone call before I left. So I had to leave out for my trip and spend a whole week trying not to think about this life-changing phone call that had to happen when I got back. Anyway, when I returned we did the stupid phone call and it went as horribly as I'd imagined. I would tell you about it, but please don't make me relive it. Okay, so, after that Moe agreed not to call me anymore, because, yes, it was that bad. We had a few more emails where we asked each other questions, then she offered to represent me! I was slightly apprehensive because she's a new agent, but I knew I'd regret turning down a definite yes to just go on the hunt. Even if I did gather up the courage to query different agents, there would be more phone calls! Besides, I liked Moe and I could tell she really understood my book. So, I said yes. Via email, of course.

Here is where I point out that this is a unicorn story. I think I'm the only writer in history to ever have gotten an agent without sending a single query letter. And I did it on my second draft. I was so superstitious about these facts for a long time that I told nobody. It still blows my mind.

Moe and I did more scrubbing and polishing. She writes really kick-ass, hilarious editorial notes, btw, full of obscure pop culture references and song lyrics. She's my kinda lady. When all that was said and done, we sent my book baby out on submission to publishers. Sub is a special kind of hell, and I figured mine would be particularly bad considering how I'd probably used all my good karma grabbing an agent on the first try. And it did suck. A lot. Sub was seven months of checking my email every 2.5 minutes, trying to decode the vague, non-sensical rejections I kept getting (this one says the plot is convoluted, another says my story isn't complex enough...) and lots and lots of ice cream. We were on our third round with the rejection count well into the double digits and I was making plans on what to do next if this book didn't sell when...the phone rang. I was in the break room at work (long term retail job because hey have I mentioned I suck at job interviews) listening to This American Life with my headphones in when the story stopped and my phone was buzzing in my hand. I looked down at the screen and the caller ID said MOE FERRERA. I thought, is this it? And it was! Moe was calling to tell me that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had made an offer on my book. I was speechless. Moe apologized for calling, but she wanted to hear my reaction. I think she was sad I didn't scream. She kept saying, "It's okay. You can freak out," but I didn't because I was in the break room and people would stare. And then she said, "Oh my God you will not believe this. I'm looking out my hotel room window and there is a FUCKING RAINBOW." MAFY is filled with all kinds of queer kid goodness (and many, many f-bombs) so suddenly this was the most perfect moment in the world. I wanted to look out the window for a rainbow, but there weren't any windows in my sad retail job break room, so I made Moe send me a photo of hers.

So, that's the story of how I took major life advice from a Ben Stiller movie, sucked ass at the ukulele, and some how ended up finding the rainbow at the end. Miles Away from You will be in bookstores everywhere Spring 2018.