No word from Georgia since 7:30, but that’s to

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No word from Georgia since 7:30, but that’s to be expected, as the kids ought to be asleep, and I doubt Sister’s going to be on her phone much since I could see from the air mattress configuration that she was sharing a bed with the girl child. 

I’ve actually mostly loaded the car, which is unprecedented for me; normally I’m paralyzed with procrastination until like 9am on Saturday. But we’re doing the Switch– taking the wheels off Dude’s car and trading them for Middle-Little sister’s wheels, since they both have VWs, and hers is very elderly, and his is getting traded in for a condition-is-irrelevant buyback because it’s one of the illegal diesels. So he figured he might as well trade it in with elderly but functional wheels, and give her his newish high-end wheels, since she asked and they’re compatible. Which means I’m driving his car, not mine, which is fine but I have to remember no joyriding offroad, the Golf has no ground clearance.

 Maybe I’ll get up and out tomorrow, like i always mean to. That’d be keen, arriving in time to hit up the market. Not like I need to buy anything at the market. But I could. 

I’m sort of proud of myself. I have had this idea that for my father’s birthday I’m going to make him a quilted cozy to hold the glass milk bottles they buy at the farmer’s market. He and Mom always go together, and he walks a pace behind her and carries the basket while she does the negotiating and buying. (There’s little to no haggling, of course; we are basically New Englanders and that isn’t done in our culture. Discounts are earned, not requested, and are given quietly and with a wink, or according to complicated rules of multiple quantities etcetera. That’s just how we do.) Mom just knows every vendor and talks to all of them at length, and Dad smiles beatifically in the manner of one who is hard-of-hearing. (Which is why literally nobody really has any idea how sharp he is. This is possibly by design on his part.)

Anyway. He wraps the milk bottles in an old scrap of bubble wrap to keep them from knocking together. I think that’s. I mean. It’s okay. But. C’mon. 

I have canvas and twill and denim fabric in small cuts and long yardages, but I can’t make myself cut into it. So instead I cut up two old pairs of jeans, an old pair of khaki pants of Dude’s (so old they were 30x34s, that’s honestly what he used to wear if he couldn’t get 29x36, which he couldn’t get), and a leftover scrap of upholstery fabric. I also had a remnant of that needlepunched mylar polyester batting stuff, and a little bit of bamboo quilt batting. 

I measured the milk jugs last time I was home, but having made the pieces up, it just seems like my pieces are too short even though I made them to the measurement. Which isn’t unlikely; I can’t actually understand numbers, see. Of course I don’t have a milk jug here to double-check. So, I’ve just assembled the pieces; I’ll put them together at my sister’s house. She has that kind of milk jugs, and since I made enough pieces to make her one too, she surely won’t mind. 

I think I’d just better bring extra fabric along. Not a lot though.

If they’re too short, well– I mean, he gets two, I was going to sew them together, plus one smaller chamber to hold the yogurt they also get in a glass container. So I’ll put them together so that the gap is between them, and put a piece of fabric without padding there; that’ll be enough so they won’t clank, and they don’t have to be insulated from one another because they’re both cold. 

I haven’t done any actual quilting. I may not actually get around to it. I sort of don’t have to; the batting is held in place by the edges. And it’s not like this is a garment or blanket, that’ll get a lot of wear. I suppose I should make it washable. It’s not like the fabric wasn’t prewashed; the jeans were worn to holes, and the trousers weren’t much better. 

The extra pieces I’m going to use for my sister’s, I’m going to attach a pocket from the jeans to, so she can stick her wallet there. Like me, she has the annoying/great kind of woman’s wallet that doesn’t fit in a pocket, and so she’s always pulling it out of her purse and throwing it in her market basket and then taking it in her hand then coming back and throwing it in her purse and then not being able to find it in the basket, etc. She handles this much better than I do, but it’s something I’m real familiar with. So I’m just going to make a pocket.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic? And because I'm me, and a (politely, I swear!) gre

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I assume you mean for Never Wrote A Letter, since you were just commenting on another post about it. If not, do correct me! LOL.

There weren’t… exactly alternate versions? but the whole thing is that before I published chapter 1 of Home Out In The Wind, I made myself sit down and write The Whole Thing, including the very ending of this story.

And oh boy. It was. Well. It wasn’t done, is the thing. I was like, It’s done! Look at me! I’m amazing! It’s done! 

And it wasn’t done. So there was some hilarious shit.

#1 Kes was introduced mm right about now. I literally introduced him to Finn as they were on their way to the standoff with Kylo Ren. He had not previously been in the story except for a scene with Leia– a brief scene. As it was happening, that was the first moment when I really knew that I’d done good by not using my usual M.O. of publishing each chapter as soon as I finished it. 

(I mean, that’s sort of an exaggeration; I usually write like 40k of unconnected scenes, pick a spot, and incorporate them, and make a story, and then start posting, but this was different because my first draft was like 150k and technically in order.) 

#2 there is a scene that literally reads “Luke/Leia/Kylo etc scene”

WTF that’s not a scene, self. 

#3 The entire climactic scene of the fight with Kylo was from Finn’s POV and I am super super bummed to have lost that because while it didn’t work at all, it was a good scene, if sort of… breezy? Anyway. I had no idea who Kylo was or what his motivation was, but fuck, I think I had a better handle on Finn. This story has taken too long and I’ve let myself get distracted by Kes. 

You want deleted snippets? Buddy, I got whole deleted scenes. I got like 15k here that didn’t make the cut. I am super bummed to have lost the bit where Kylo can’t freeze Finn’s blaster bolt entirely, I fucking loved that image, but I couldn’t make it work in the new scene. I’ll have to do it later somewhere!! 

Anyway, here’s Finn being super badass, only in a scene that doesn’t hang together with any of my subplots and is super rough and unbeta’d and repeats words and such: 

The big Shozer from the inn met them at the door. “Hurry,” he said, anxious, and Finn had to stop and shake his head to clear it after the door shut.

“We know,” Kes said. He looked around. “Do we have all the exits?”

“We do,” the Shozer said.

Finn grimaced, pressing the heel of his hand against the middle of his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose; the Dark Force user was making a godawful mess of the entire place, expanding dramatically outward. “We gotta hurry,” he said.

Kes pulled his blaster out, and it made a high-pitched whine as he flipped it to the ready position. “You don’t actually have to tell me that,” he said.

By the time they fetched up against the doors to the conference room, Finn could tell that Kylo knew he was there. “This is probably a suicide attack,” Finn said quietly to the people leaning against the walls beside him. Kes was closest, but the big Shozer was just behind him, and there were four other Utilians, three women and a man, all human and wildly varying ages. “I don’t know when our reinforcements will be able to arrive. They have a Dark Force user, a knight, and he knows I’m here, and he knows me, and he’s waiting for me to come through that door. I can feel him, I know for certain he’s there and he’s expecting us.”

“I don’t care,” Kes said. “The rest of you, I won’t judge if you don’t follow us, but I don’t care.”

Finn looked at him, and there was something in the set of his jaw that he viscerally understood. He met Kes’s eyes, and nodded sharply, and in tandem they kicked the door open.

Kylo Ren was standing in the middle of the room, arms extended. Everyone else was frozen, motionless, and Poe was sprawled on the floor in front of him, and the walls behind him were made of something transparent, a dozen people sitting or standing around watching, and that was all of the tableau Finn had time for. Kes immediately fired twice with his blaster, and Kylo gestured, freezing both shots. But Finn had already targeted the Stormtroopers behind him, felling three with three shots, and his fourth shot refused to freeze when Kylo grabbed it out of the air. It crept, shimmering, toward him, and the knight stared at it in visible startlement.

“You,” he said to Finn, and tossed Kes’s blaster shots back at him. Kes had apparently been expecting it, because he ducked and ran forward. But he wasn’t trying to get to Kylo. He skidded across the floor and slammed into Poe’s limp body, and picked him up.

“Me,” Finn said to Kylo, watching Kes from the corner of his eye. He had sort of– okay, he hadn’t expected that Kes had literally just come here to die holding Poe, but he guessed he was going to have to work with that. The Utilians were in the doorway behind him, though he hadn’t expected them to actually follow. Finn snapped off another blaster shot toward the remaining First Order members, aiming in particular for an officer whose stripes proclaimed him a general, but Kylo’s energy stopped it.

The First Order soldiers had all drawn blasters and a few had fired back, but those bolts all stopped too. Kylo was stopping all of the blaster fire, except the one bolt of Finn’s that was still creeping toward him. He was watching it. “That’s why you broke your conditioning,” Kylo said. “You’re Force-sensitive after all. I had wondered.”

Kes hauled Poe up into a sitting position, even though the younger man was utterly unresponsive, and held Poe’s head against his shoulder, rocking very slightly. He wasn’t crying or shouting, he was just holding him, and he still had his blaster in his hand, and he was watching Kylo Ren. Maybe he wasn’t out of this entirely.

“I broke my conditioning because it was wrong,” Finn said. Everyone had stopped firing, since none of it was landing on anything. There was an oppressive pressure on him, like the weight of everyone’s eyes, but he knew it was Kylo. He was completely outmatched, here, but all he really had to do was distract Kylo for a little bit longer. That’s all this was.

“So did I,” Kylo said. He turned his head slightly, and Finn could feel him refocusing his attention. “Kes Dameron,” he said.

“Will you kill me too?” Kes asked. “Or will you leave me to bury my son, and make me do it myself later?”

“Intriguing notion,” Kylo said, “but he isn’t dead. You have no imagination.”

On cue, Poe made a strangled little noise, and Kes looked pained and let Poe’s head tip back away from his shoulder. Finn was waiting, waiting for Kylo’s attention to slip, but it was still holding firm. Meanwhile all Finn could do was keep that blaster bolt creeping toward him slowly. Kylo had deflected it slightly, but Finn knew he could curve it back at the last moment if Kylo’s attention wavered.

“Papa,” Poe said, soft and bewildered.

“Mijito,” Kes breathed, face creased in pain. “Lo siento, mijito.”

“Me duele, Papa,” Poe murmured plaintively.

“Lo siento,” Kes answered him. “Lo siento.”

“Didn’t you break your conditioning for love?” Kylo asked, refocusing on Finn.

“I broke my conditioning,” Finn said, focusing on not letting his voice reflect the strain he was feeling, “because it’s not right to treat people as disposable things.”

“Nearly the only thing left in this one’s mind was his sentimental attachments,” Kylo said, and Finn kept his gaze on the knight’s implacable mask, not letting himself stare at the blaster bolt, thinking surely the knight was focused on too many things, on everyone else’s bolts too, and keeping everyone frozen, and wouldn’t be able to keep it all up indefinitely. All Finn had to do was curve that blaster bolt’s trajectory. “He has a very sentimental attachment to you. Too bad you were as unfaithful to him as to your former masters.”

It occurred to Finn that Kylo was looking for an opening, which took some of the sting out of the observation. “I don’t think it’s the same,” Finn said.

“I think wiping his memory and dumping him here as an unwitting distraction with no defenses is a more profound betrayal than simply seeing other people sometimes,” Kylo said. “He had no expectation that anyone would save him. His last thoughts as himself were of how alone he was in the world.”

“Who is he now?” Finn asked, and he felt it then, felt the finger Kylo was trying to slip in under his defenses, to pry him up and take him over. He slammed his mental plating back down.

“He is a distraction,” Kylo said, and released all of the blaster bolts at once. Finn yanked, trying to curve that bolt, but it took too much concentration and Kylo slid under his armor deftly. Finn screamed, and someone else fired a blaster, and suddenly Kylo’s darkness yanked away, and the knight bellowed in anger.

Kes had shot him, and was struggling to his feet, with Poe over his shoulder. The knight staggered back, bringing his lightsaber up, the same horrid ragged red blade that Finn remembered so vividly from that snowy forest.

The frozen bolts had all cascaded into the newly-released frozen crowd, and there was a chorus of screaming, showers of sparks as some of the bolts hit the transparent wall, and general chaos. Finn clamped down his mental defenses and fired his blaster again. Kylo deflected it with his saber. He wasn’t fatally injured, but he was slowed-down. “Go,” Finn said to Kes, “go, go,” and Kylo was laughing, a horrible sound, “just get him out!”

Some of the people in formal dress who had been among the First Order officers were now struggling against them. Some of the First Order people were dead. Someone who looked like the holopic Finn had seen of the planet’s New Republican Senator was lying open-eyed in a pool of blood. The Util Resistance fighters who had come in with him were scattered behind various bits of furniture, mostly shooting at Kylo but not having any luck.

Finn hadn’t had much practice deflecting blaster bolts, though he knew he could. He didn’t have the focus, not with Kylo still trying to get into his mind, so he ducked and rolled behind a decorative but sturdy end table, upending it and using it as a shield. There were several First Order officers still alive, and as he watched, one of the exquisitely-dressed noblewomen leapt onto the back of a colonel, yanking his head brutally backward and then using him as a human shield against the surviving Stormtrooper belatedly trying to protect him. Finn snapped off a shot at the Stormtrooper, who fell, and the noblewoman discarded the colonel’s corpse and ducked behind another end table.

Finn supposed everyone in this room was doomed, but he could see, behind him, that the Shozer had covered Kes’s retreat. No one here, including himself, was going to be able to kill Kylo Ren, however. He had no illusions. Kylo was advancing on him now, on Finn specifically, and Finn fired at him again and again, and grabbed the bolts of other blasters out of the air and curved them to throw them at Kylo too, and nothing could get through and he was going to get cornered, and that was just a damn shame because he had nothing but this blaster and it wasn’t going to get through, and he knew now that Kylo could maintain enough concentration to keep from getting shot and to invade Finn’s mind pretty handily.

Well, fuck.

“Kill me if you want,” he said, ready for a last stand, “but you still didn’t get this planet!”

“I am aware,” Kylo intoned dramatically, “that you have a cruiser in orbit, but you cannot think I fear it.” The prying blackness hooked at the edge of Finn’s mind, prying implacably, and it got through enough that Finn suddenly could feel the terrible creeping horror of it. Kylo was feeding him Poe’s despair, he realized with some resignation: this was the moment Kylo had bragged about, when Poe had understood that nobody was coming for him and this was it, for him to face alone.

Maybe the worst thing was how relieved Poe felt. And that was the prey hypnotized by the snake, in part, when your fear froze you, and your terror left you so wrung-out that you could only be relieved it was ending. It was trying to suck Finn down, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep fighting it off.

In that moment, Rey crashed in through the window with her light-saber blazing blue, and Finn laughed in savage joy and threw half a dozen blaster bolts at Kylo.

See it was breezy as fuck and maybe I hadn’t actually considered any of the logistics, and note that Bolt didn’t exist yet and Pava wasn’t in this, and I hadn’t figure out what to do with Luke Skywalker either, but. You know. 

It was a hell of a scene. And it made Finn the hero of the story. And I am in goddamn mourning to have lost that. But I had to add in Bolt, and then I had to leave room for Rey, and I just couldn’t make this be as quick as this. 

I should’ve done better by Finn, though. I let him down. 

Shit, y’know, maybe this was a better scene than the one I actually wrote? This is the problem I’ve always had with novels; I can’t revise things without just massively rerouting, and it’s tremendous wasted effort. I wish I had better discipline, or– something. I don’t know. I don’t know! There’s no right answer.

FOR THE RECORD, the Iberican is untranslated because Finn doesn’t speak it, but Poe says exactly the same things as he does in the published scene, which is translated because it’s Kes’s POV and he speaks the language. 

asks: questions here | AO3 here

statuamsalis: icelikevinyl: the new phrase i am going to use...

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statuamsalis:

icelikevinyl:

the new phrase i am going to use in order to express yearning for death is “O Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling”

I NEED THEE EVERY HOUR, OH MY GOD WHERE IS THE RECORDING

Oh Christ of course I know this song.

Here’s a recording, sounds close enough to the version i know.

Why do I know this song. I don’t know. But I do.

For some reason I got it in my head that I should get up SUPER EARLY and get on the road SUPER EARLY

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For some reason I got it in my head that I should get up SUPER EARLY and get on the road SUPER EARLY to be at the farm by lunchtime and get going on work work work! and this morning my sister was like, so, we’re going to a friend’s for dinner, and I was like oh uh. So uh. Middle-Little sister? is out of town. Mom and Dad are at a party tonight. So I’d. Be there at the farm by myself. Oh, said Farmsister, you could probably come to this dinner party, uhh– and I was like you know what, I’d rather stay at my own house and hang out with my dude?

So I’m going suuuuper early tomorrow instead. Mayyybe I can use some of this energy to reorganize my shit instead of loading half-packed bags full of random things into my car until the car is full. 

I’m going to meet them tomorrow at the Cooperstown Farmer’s Museum, which was a staple of my childhood but which I haven’t visited since I was a child. There’s a tractor show! I’m excited about that. 

The only downside is that Cooperstown is 4 hours from here, and 1.5 from their house, so if they’re aiming to get there at 10, I have to leave here at… oh. Well, if the car’s loaded it won’t be so bad. 

Since I’m playing hooky today, here’s a

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Since I’m playing hooky today, here’s a little chunk of the They All Went Out To Lunch And Felt Better chapter I’m carrot-and-sticking myself through the Action Plot Finale with. 

“Spit it out, Papa,” Poe said, not unkindly.

Kes tilted his head and gave Poe an unimpressed look. And it was in that moment, really, for the first time, that Poe suddenly realized that his father and he were really both adults, really on a mostly-equal footing, and truly no longer had any particular vestige of the authority his father had always sort of casually had over him– either for Poe to obey or defy. It was immaterial. They were just two men, with a shared history, but no particular obligation to one another, in either direction.

It was utterly bizarre, and felt like being unmoored, and Poe sat up to put both of his feet on the floor.

“What is it, Papa?” he asked, because while it was freeing, it was also terrifying. They owed one another nothing, and that meant that they had nothing tying them together except sentiment.

wetheurban: PHOTOGRAPHY: Gregory Crewdson Legend

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wetheurban:

PHOTOGRAPHY: Gregory Crewdson 

Legendary photography Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with the dream-like vision of filmmakers such as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch.

Read More

oh! I’ve seen some of his work in person at Mass MoCa. It’s– what this doesn’t convey is that the prints are like, wall-sized. It’s life-sized pictures, mostly.
There’s something really amazing about that, beyond what you can see in this set.

I gotta ask. How do you feel about the Cubs chances in the postseason, given that they're overcoming

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I know very little about baseball, but it makes perfect sense to me that in this, the year that so many things about America have stopped making sense, the commonly held laws of our national pastime do not seem to apply.

Just got updated! Apparently there’s no cell

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Just got updated! Apparently there’s no cell service, so Sis had to go out this morning looking for coverage. Her husband, with the Guard, moved closer to the action but that means they’re also somewhere with no power and no cell service, so she has no idea where he is or what/how he’s doing. The worst was midnight to 4 am, so she was up listening and is pooped. Worst, only after the power went out did she realize that the brand-new batteries she’d bought for her radio were no good. So, no updates, no cellphone, no power, very little sleep, but the house is fine, the roof is fine, the neighbors are fine, even her car is fine. 

The area is a mess of downed power lines and downed trees, but no local flooding anyway. She called Mom, who then updated the rest of us just now. 

I was at that very moment tormenting myself with the extremely dramatic galleries of images on weather.com, including some of flooded Savannah. 

meanderings0ul replied to your post “cruelsunflower replied to your post “Somehow, despite all the…”

I’m from the gulf coast, the eye of Ike went over my hometown, and I remember the Rita mess very well, so staying put under evacuation sounds so normal to me. As long as you can trust your land, house, and ability to take care of yourself without normal assistance, which sounds like is the case, everything should be ok<3 Being without power sucks I’m sure, though I wouldn’t personally know. Am from very small area and we had a generator. keeping positive thoughts for all

and @unicornduke had a charming tale of youthful exuberance in the face of disaster– hey, I remember the 1987 October storm, playing under trees and later Mom being like ‘you didn’t go under trees right’ and be like O.O um of course not! 

tardygrading said: I’m holding your sister in my thoughts along with my brother and his family.

I’ll keep them in mine too! I hope they’re all right this morning. It’s so scary. 

I ventured onto Facebook, mostly because I was seeing if anyone had heard from my sister (sometimes texts go missing), and was a little encouraged that even on there, people are talking about how to support Haiti without giving anything to the ACR, who let them down so badly after the last one. 

Let us not discuss what else I saw on Facebook… actually it wasn’t awful. 

Oh, I emailed my cousin of the transatlantic phone call, and he confirmed that it was indeed his son, and then wrote a charming little update post. (”I don’t do Facebook,” he confessed, “but, you know, lately I Snapchat a lot?” and I thought, man, what is the deal with Snapchat? I only ever used it to draw dicks on things.)

il-leone: Truth be told, this happened because

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Ivy
Laurel
il-leone:

Truth be told, this happened because I’ve always thought that the ring motif in the right circle looked like the rebel alliance insignia. So that was a loose excuse to take a Mucha piece and redo it with a Star Wars theme, which is oh so original but consider it practice I guess. 

Even though the right circle - Laurel/Leia drew me to this idea at first, I ended up working with Ivy/Padme first, which just makes me laugh because I’m not really fond of her, lol.

But yay!! Drawing things again!!! Drawing things again but starting new pieces and ignoring all the WIPs on my desktop yayyyy