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In which I’ve made a terrible mistake

March 7, 2020March 9, 2020 Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I am roughly forty-three and three-quarters years old. For roughly 25 of those years, I have had facial hair, and for the last, oh, 15 months or so it has been long enough to be notable.

Apparently, in all that time, I have not acquired the necessary skills that “let’s trim this mess back by a couple of inches” is something I am actually capable of doing. Believe me, it came as a surprise. I thought that was something I knew how to do! But I do not. I did not intend to do this terrible thing to my face when I began “trimming” my lovely beard earlier today. And it happened anyway. I am very sorry, particularly since the children will not want to discuss anything but my face on Monday.

I am probably going to go ahead and dye it now, because it’s not like I can fuck up any further than I have.

Why not, right?

This is how much I don’t want to be grading

January 26, 2020March 9, 2020 Luther M. Siler

There is a new, canonical Benevolence Archives microfiction up at Patreon right now. I don’t update my Patreon nearly as often as I ought to but I’m also prone to not charging people during the months where I don’t update much, and there’s definitely enough content up over there now to justify your $1 or $2 every couple of months. So if the idea of more BA excites you at all, maybe check it out.

In other news, I am watching basketball again. IU is up four on Maryland at the moment with two minutes left; we’ll see if me posting that fact here ends up losing the game for them.(*)

(Yes, I have managed to more or less eradicate paying attention to sports from my life. No, I will never manage to eradicate being deeply superstitious about IU basketball. Never, as long as I live; it’s ground in there too deeply.)

That said, I’ve now blogged, written actual fiction, done a bit of light cleaning around the house, showered and gotten dressed today, so I’m much closer to an adult than I usually am on a typical Sunday and there is at least a chance that some of the ridiculous pile of grading I need to take care of is going to have some headway made on it after dinner.

Just a chance, mind you, not a guarantee. Just because I’m close to being an adult today doesn’t mean I’m a responsible one. 🙂

(*) Did Maryland end the game with a 7-0 run and win by a point, despite the fact that I waited to post this until after the game ended? Yes, they did. Am I nonetheless responsible for the loss, even though I could very well have deleted the evidence and not said anything about it to anyone? Yes. Yes, I am.

An unfortunate announcement

March 10, 2016 Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Okay.

I discussed this a bit the other day, but it’s official now: Sunlight is on hold, and when it comes back it may not be Sunlight anymore. I remain deeply unhappy with the manuscript as it currently exists, and it badly needs a massive restructuring. Basically a page one rewrite. There are bits of it I can salvage, but even those are going to need restructuring and moving around.

So I’m putting it aside for a while. The new goal– and I think this is possible, but y’all know how I am about hitting my own deadlines– is to have the next Benevolence Archives book available by IndyPopCon in June. That’s going to be crazy tight, I’m not gonna lie. But I’m already 1/3 of the way to my target wordcount for it, so it’s not impossible. I still want the Skylights sequel out in 2016, but it’s going to have to be later in the year. I need to put it away for a while to get a clearer perspective on where I want the story to go.

The good news is that I’m really happy with the stories I’ve written so far for Tales from the Benevolence Archives. This is good stuff. You’ll like it. I promise. 🙂

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Screw your plans, boy! edition

July 21, 2015 Luther M. Siler2 Comments

So the big job today was to pull the sink. This is the sink; by the time I took this picture I had already removed the doors from the front of the vanity to make getting at the rest of the thing easier:

I’ve never actually disconnected a sink from a wall, mind you, so (much like every other step in this process) I’m being real careful to make sure not to fuck anything up along the way. First step in pulling a bathroom sink is to turn off the water. I didn’t get a picture, because cutting the water to the toilet was a piece of cake. The shutoff valves for the sink, on the other hand, were 1) stuck and 2) started crumbling in my hand when I tried to apply a bit more force to them.

I don’t know much, but I know when I’m about to make a big mistake, and shearing the shutoff valve sure as shit sounded like a big mistake. So, maybe ten minutes into the big job of the day, I called a halt and called a plumber. That was at maybe 9:00 this morning or so; it’s 3:15 now and the plumber left about half an hour ago, so yay for folks who can get out quickly. The plumber disconnected the sink for me and replaced the shutoff valves, all the while swearing at the shitty plumbing job the builders had done– which is not the first time I’ve heard that. Every plumber who has ever entered this house has left wanting to travel back in town and beat hell out of the dude who built the place.

There was some careful examination of the way the sink attached to the vanity, because it looked like the most obvious way to pull the sink out had a good risk of dropping it through the countertop, potentially wrecking my new shutoff valves. This seemed bad.

So I went with the second most obvious way, and just grabbed the countertop and yanked. Amazingly, it worked:

Just in case you were wondering if this was a quality vanity or not:

And then we pulled the rest of the thing, and the swearing started, and the swearing really hasn’t stopped yet; I’m actually swearing uncontrollably under my breath while I’m typing this, because this fucking bullshit was what was under the vanity:

Make sure you look closely, there, and note that several of the long broken pieces on the right there actually match missing pieces elsewhere on the tile, meaning that they tried to pull up the tile, gave up quickly, and then just threw the shit under the vanity.

Also, five will get you twenty that that’s asbestos tile, and it’s also a good quarter-inch lower than the rest of the floor, meaning I have to redo my flooring plan again. I’m hoping I can just find a piece of plywood of the right size and slap the fucker in place, because otherwise I’m going to have to pull the entire floor, because unless I miss my guess those tiles are made of cancer.