WIP Wednesday: Your last glimpse of Some Assembly Required before it is submitted!

Lex Chase and I have been hard at work finishing up our comedic (and surprisingly angsty and robust) foray into IKEA's spectral plane. I'm spending my day with some last-minute edits and then Some Assembly Required will be off to our publisher. It's been an interesting lark--much plottier and heartfelt than we'd imagined it we jokingly set out to see if we could outline a book based on a silly writing exercise assigned by Damon Suede at a conference in Orlando earlier this year.

It was never a book we truly intended to write, but Damon liked the snippets we'd written in the class and encouraged us to continue it. And then our editor heard him talking about it with us, and the rest is history. Or rather, the rest is ghosts falling in love in purgatory, which just happens to be housed in IKEA.

Given how much time we've spent frantically trying to finish by our deadline--which is today, by the way, because Lex and I like to live dangerously and down-to-the-wire--it was a surprise that coming to the end of the manuscript took us by, well, surprise. Suddenly we were done. It was happy, to be sure, because every writer likes to actually finish a project. But we were also sad to leave Benji and Patrick behind because we'd fallen in love with them. Personally, I think I might miss Agnes the most. She's plucky and mysterious and has most of the great one-liners in the book. *g*

So without further ado, here's the last snipped of Some Assembly Required you'll see here in #WIPWednesday, since after today it's no longer a #WIP. *sniffle*

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Some Assembly Required, release February or March 2016, Dreamspinner Press

Agnes didn't look over, absorbed in her knitting and apparently trusting him to work through the snarled yarn himself. He started winding. “Find her parents?” 

Benji didn't bother to ask how she knew. Agnes seemed to know everything that went on in the store, which made it all the more puzzling that Patrick thought he could prank her. Surely Patrick realized that Agnes was more, didn't he? Benji couldn't put it to words, not even in his own head, so he'd never tried to talk about it with Patrick. Besides, he kind of liked the unique bond he and Agnes had. It was certainly better than the antagonistic one she shared with Patrick. 

“Her mom. Pretty sure that will be the last time she wanders off. She was shaken up.”  

Agnes nodded, looking up briefly from her knitting. “Something about it shook you up, too.” 

It had, but he hadn't really noticed it until Agnes said something. He was always happy to reunite a missing kid with its parents, but it usually felt better than this. Today Benji just felt empty.  

And really, always and usually? Benji wasn't one for melodramatics, even in his own inner monologues. Why was he be using words that implied he'd been here years when it had been a month or two, tops? He needed to find a hobby or something.  

“I wish Patrick would decide if he was avoiding me or not,” he said, because Patrick was kind of like having a hobby. If a hobby was rude and sarcastic and more often than not ended with Benji needing to regenerate in the ball pit with Agnes.  

Agnes hummed. “Patrick has a lot more than that to decide,” she murmured. Her lips moved soundlessly as she counted her stitches, though the mass of finished rows on her lap followed no discernible pattern. Agnes's knitting was as cryptic as her advice.