Caelyn Sandel

The Wait Strikes Twelve

It's well past my preferred sleep cycle, but a film of day-stress clings to me like a film of astringent oil, keeping me awake and agitated. My partner is still at work.

I am painstakingly crafting a rectangular frame of matte blue putty on our den wall. Hand-rolled tubes of tack pressed flat, the frame segments struggle to keep purchase against the smooth veneer of the wall and I discard several that fall onto the rug.

My first attempt to mount the art fails miserably, and I lose...

the ecto_foolery update (for everybody!)

Hi! Welcome to my Patreon page. I'm Caelyn Sandel, formerly @inurashii but newly @ecto_foolery as of the writing of this post. I'm now ecto_foolery on twitter, cohost, and discord (ecto-foolery on tumblr), and this page's URL has been changed to https://patreon.com/ecto_foolery accordingly.

This is where I occasionally post updates about my projects, but sometimes post work itself. I like sharing unfinished prototy...

the ecto_foolery update (for Patrons)

This is the first time I've spoken directly to my stalwart pledges in a long time. I hope you've all been either enjoying or appreciating The Wait; the next part is bubbling up. I appreciate you all so much. Thank you for sticking around during times when I had nothing in me. If you're newly joined or rejoined, thank you for being here now! None of this would be possible without so much quiet and unyielding support, especially during this time of prolonged hardship.

Thank you.<...

11 - the Wait - 11

It's lunch.

I've already eaten, but there's a precious scrap of time before I have to lower my proverbial carcass back into the proverbial swine pit. A tiny moment that's just mine.

I pull a little radio from my bag, followed by a coiled coaxial cable. I spend a few minutes struggling with the F-connector until both sides of the cable are connected to the radio and computer aux port respectively.

Since this is the middle of the block, I wouldn't normally get any reception wh...

WAIT - X

My desk at work is clean and austere. On it sits everything I need to work.

A basic keyboard and turtle, a reusable water bottle, a photo of my spouse, an administrator's notepad and pen. And of course the big screen, leering over the edge of the desk where its metal neck is clamped.

My chair is just the right amount of comfortable that it feels okay to sit in until the end of the day when I have to get up. For now I'm miserably early in my shift, so the chair seems like the least...

Nine Waits...

I struggle through my routine like a worm harvester trudging through the mire.

I rouse briefly during the longest part of my daily commute: the lift queue. In an austere lobby, dozens of residents wait their turn to reach other parts of the tower. Few of us look down at the stripes on the floor, falling automatically into the queue corresponding to our chosen floor.

I watch a confused straggler look down at the stripes and fold awkwardly into the queue for an lift that only visits...

Wait, Eight

I stir and the light leaks in through my breached eyelids.

I uncurl the arm thrown over my partner, who snores softly against my chest, and pet their hair. Wedging my face against the pillow, I slowly open my eyes so they can adjust to the light of morning through the wide fiberoptic skylight set into our wall. As I extricate myself from the bed, I lever my eyes gradually open. The light pouring through is the same pallid, weak fare that it's been for months, and I wade through it with ...

7 ~*~ THE WAIT ~*~ 7

I break the waters of sleep at the ripples of my partner's return to bed. I let instinct drive my body to heave itself over and curl around them.

"Welcome home," I murmur. My partner says something that doesn't make it through the layer of sleepy haze, and I go, "mm?"

"I said thank you for dinner. It was good," they repeat, voice sodden.

"Bad work day," I venture.

"Yes," they confirm, but push back against my embrace with warmth. "I probably won't be up until you're at...

6. The Wait.

I step out onto the balcony and slide the glass door shut behind me. Half a meter away from closed, the door digs into its track with an earsplitting screech. I leave it.

Carefully lowering my butt onto an overturned milk crate, I wince as my trick spine sends icy jolts down both legs. I fumble for the radio sitting on the other milk crate and switch it on. Jangling music spills into my face and I jam the analog preset button at the far end of the radio and it's quiet.

Just the vo...

The Fifth Wait

I make dinner and then eat it alone on the kitchen bar, staring idly at gray skies through the porch doors. Partner won't be back until after my bedtime, but they can heat up some of the leftovers I packed into washed takeout containers.

We have some time together tomorrow, but I think we're both going to be too burned out to be much company at all. My job may feel dull and cruel at times, but theirs is worse.

I rinse my plate and walk back out to the porch.

The Wait for...

I find the notch near the top of the grocery envelope and tear it open.

Three long, flat packages go straight into the freezer. I upturn the bag over a drawer and dump the rest out before picking up one packet, which I unwrap. I toss the lump within into a measuring cup, pour water over it, and stick it in the fridge.

As I'm throwing away the grocery packaging, I notice that our mailbox indicator light is on. I open the box and pull out some envelopes that I can't seem to force my...

The Wait. 3

I'm back from work with this week's groceries tucked under one arm.

In those moments before I step on the pedal for the front room lights, the little flat is painted with only the flat blue of the untuned TV. Then the lights come on and that blue becomes a filter over the scene instead, rendering those indistinct silhouettes into washed-out detail. It feels like the apartment has been in cryosleep since I left.

It's quiet. My partner is at work, so all I can hear is the distant ro...

The Wait (2)

Inside the glass doors of the living unit, a big-screen TV bathes the room in a flat cerulean glow, washing away the soft gray of the outside.

I don't know how to turn it off. We have a remote control for the TV, but it's not the main one and the power button doesn't work. I don't know what happened to the other remote.

I pick up the remote and flip to another channel, then remember that our content package expired, so every channel is the same dead blue again.

Once I tried ...

The Wait

I step out onto the narrow balcony and look up at a sky-spanning gray smear. None of the dancing gray of ancient TV static nor the flushed hue of a dead channel in that dead softness, just a cold cement firmament.

The only other living block I can see juts out of the low, sickly carpet of our local woodland, its concrete stained a false yellow in contrast from the soft blue-grey of the coffin sky.

I can hear my downstairs neighbor slide open the balcony door. I think about saying ...

Art of 2020

Well, it's been a year. You all know, right?

As always, thank you so much for your patience and patronage. I've had very little time this year for personal projects or doing much to maintain all of my points of communication, but that's not to say I haven't been busy.

Busy doing what? Well, Caves of Qud is doing better than ever, and I've become a snapjaw VTuber to help spread the word....

Concrete Fears and Diffuse Hopes

Hello friends. I've been neglecting you, and I'm sorry for that. Things have been pretty rough for everyone, and I'm no exception— creative work is challenging in times of stress and anguish. But we carry on, and we make stuff, and if we're lucky people remember it for a while.

You should have in your inbox an invitation to claim a copy of Returns, my latest dynfic featuring an illustration by Phineas Klier and an ambient soundtrack. I've got another twine in development, going back t...

Returns

a small dynamic fiction story about letting go and getting back.

(to claim your free copy, follow the link above and connect your itch.io account to Patreon.)

a micrononfiction retrospective

(originally told on twitter, edited and formatted for Patreon)

It's early 2010.

I'm dragging myself out of bed at 4 in the morning so I can take the T to Downtown Crossing and open the Starbucks where I work.  I don't hate my job, but I hate being desperate and underpaid, playing the lottery with my health even after a dental hospitalization. 

I'm dating one of my roommates, who suggests I apply to a QA opening at the music game company she works for. I'm ...

Glimpses From Elsewhere is OUT on itch.io!

Buy it! Share it! Post about it! Leave a review! 

What the heck is Caelyn doing?

I'll tell you, friends! Thank you so much for your support and encouragement as I work on some of the biggest projects of my whole life. You've all been so patient with few updates, but making art during difficult times can be slow.

But it's not like I have nothing to show you. :)

Glimpses From Elsewhere

My microfic collection is fully gathered, fully formatted, and it's undergone an editing pass. Once I've added the bonus book-only stories, it's just a matt...

Big Bloomin' Thank You!

Live and drink, friends! Do you know what you've done? You've pledged over five hundred dollars to help me get paid to make art! That's so amazing!

When I reworked my Patreon tier rewards, I set $500 as the milestone at which I'd begin concerted work on Season Two of Bloom, and here we are! Time for me to dust off my twine chops and make this happen!

While I'm fixing to cook up the next episode, you can play season one of...

Patreon-exclusive Microfic Collection Preview!!

Hey there wonderful pledges, here it is: the preview draft of my upcoming microfic collection. I wrote these vignettes over the course of years, tweet by tweet, sponsored by small donations from my followers, who provided the story prompts.

I'll be messing around with the organization of it a bit before I add the art. If you would be interested in funding a print run of this collection, please let me know!

Comments are enable...

Microfic Collection!

Hello, lovely pledges! As always, thank you so very much for your continued support.

Though Caves of Qud has been sopping up much of my narrative design energy lately, that isn't to say that I haven't been doing anything else! Those of you who follow my Twitter account have seen my #microfiction, tiny stories with prompts provided by my sponsors. 

I've been archiving those stories and commissioning artists to draw some of the recurring characters, all with t...

Metamorph, an experimental Prose RPG

The year is 2023.

It's been almost 30 years since the first outbreak of the Change, and over 20 since the pandemic was controlled by the Metastabilizer vaccine. But now, unknowingly nurtured by the anti-vaccination movement, a new strain of the Change has appeared in hotspots all over America, allowing frenzied, mutated humans to roam free and kill once again. President Vancamp has sworn to exterminate the Changed, but rumors on social media sugge...

2019-03-01 15:46:06 +0000 UTC View Post