Thirty more sketches from last year’s daily sketch project.
Story Seed #56 The Telepathy Plague
A virus spreads. It is airborn, carried via respiratory droplets from host to host. Its incubation period is about a month so it has infected millions before the first cases are reported. Symptoms start small. The infected person starts to “hear” thoughts that are foreign, have desires that are new, remember memories of events they’ve never experienced. Only an infected person can “hear” another infected person. As the disease progesses infected people begin to experience more direct contact. One person can feel anothers physical pains, anothers emotional highs and lows, anothers direct thoughts.
How many people would run from infection? How many people would run to it? How many people would seek a cure? How much chaos would result from people being unable to keep secrets, being unable to lie, being able to see each others needs and pains?
Recommendation
Patrick E. MacLean writes fiction and essays. He also podcasts them. Most of the time I like reading more than listening so I appreciate that he has both options available. And both versions are worth experiencing.
Local News
I haven’t added much (if anything) to my Zazzle and Redbubble stores this week. I have plenty of images to use to make products. I’ve been lacking words. Rather, I’ve been lacking the necessary enthusiasm to write sales copy. Every time I post something new I have to write something new. Most mornings I’ve gone to one site or the other, picked an image I wanted to use and then drew a blank on what to say.
On the internet, a picture doesn’t speak for itself. Internet searches are based on words. No words, no search results.
I.m okay with fallow creative times. Drawing a blank with words doesn’t mean I’m drawing nothing at all. I’m currently working my way through sketches for a couple of proposed Call of Cthulhu supplements. Other projects are in the thinking and sketching stages.
Our housemate moved out at the beginning of the month so we’ve been moving things around in the apartment. And once you start moving things you really notice the things you don’t need anymore. I’ve been putting the “don’t need” things onto Craigslist, free to anyone who will come pick them up. Most of that stuff congregated in a side room that we’d left unused so our housemate could use it. She put a couple of things there that didn’t fit in her room and then ignored the space. Over the years stuff we weren’t using ended up there. Of course.
I want to turn the room into a conscious storage space. I’ve got large pieces and flat files and shelves of art that could get moved into that room and open up more space in the studio/library. I’ve also got 11 days off from USPS starting this Friday that I can use to move stuff. Fun, fun, fun!
I hope your week goes well. I hope you get a lot of rain, physically and metaphorically. Large parts of the country need it these days. If your soul is dry and dusty, please seek out some emotional H2O and spiritual fertilizer. The world already has a lot of people burning up and burning out. We need each other. It’s heatlhy to look after others. It’s healthy to accept help.
Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!
Story Seed #54 A New Spell for Utopia
Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.
Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.
So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.
We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.
Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?
Recommendation Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide
Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.
Local News
I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.
The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.
Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.
It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.
In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.
Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.
I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.
The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.
Am I really performing magic?
It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.
And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.
Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.
Another thirty of last year’s Daily Half Hour Sketches, now in one handy gallery.
Story Seed #52 A Stone in the River
Most crime fighters and/or superheroes are reactive. Mostly they take action after a crime has been committed either to bring villains to justice or, on the more antihero side, get revenge for the victims. There are a few stories of characters or organizations that stop crimes before they occur, they catch criminals before they can become criminals, they punish the guilty before they can be guilty of a crime. Usually the organizations manage this by either having members with precognitive abilities or computers with the same abilities. Eunice Stone can’t see the future. She simply knows how to read people. If she spends enough time around someone she’ll be able to predict how that person is likely to react in any situation.
She doesn’t see good or bad people. Eunice sees life as a game. She sees human beings as mostly unaware entities trapped in massive systems, reacting to outside stimuli and stuck in lives that, too often, spiral further out of control. So, as a child, Eunice set out, not to fix the systems – she knew that was too big a task – but to redirect the people who are trapped in them. A suggestion here. A secret favor there. Redirecting an angry man’s attention at someone who deserves his wrath rather than the family he’s been taking it out on. Showing the unrepentant thief better targets than his neighbors.
Eunice becomes a fixer. The smarter and more aware people around her, both criminals and legitimate businesspeople, notice what she does and try to enlist her in improving their situations. And she does. Mostly to the advantage of everyone in a situation. She makes connections. She points out solutions. She goes around her clients selfish desires and finds points them at satisfying ends. Eunice knows that there is always a win win scenario.
And for those who refuse to play her way? Those who can only win by making someone lose? Eunice will take them out of the game.
Recommendation
The Kickstarter for Growing Up / Overnight ends on the 30th. Please support this project! Thank you!
Local News
Life at the Post Office has been tiring. Last week was my Long Week, six days in a row, every day with overtime. There are a lot of carriers on vacation at the moment so a lot of routes need coverage. I volunteer for a desired route at the beginning of my shift in order to avoid being mandated to carry a route I don’t particularly like. This will make for a larger paycheck but currently I’m only noticing a more tired body.
I’ve read the news about the Postmaster General’s sabotage of USPS. I haven’t noticed any unique new problems. Upper management is doing more micromanaging but they do that every few months anyway so, if I hadn’t been hearing about the new PMG, I’d just assume regular management stupidity. Being a letter carrier is a job. I’m past the point of feeling any particular loyalty to a job. Jobs don’t love the people who do them and upper management in most businesses will make decisions that poorly affect the people who have to follow the new directives. If upper management consulted the workers before implementing a new procedure that would be unusual.
So I do my best to put my emotional and creative energy into activities where I can have some fun and some control. This last week Sarah has been good at reminding me to get some drawing in after work, regardless of how tired I am. Just 15 minutes can improve my mood.
In the mornings I generally do computer work. Photoshop. Writing here. I have now have two online stores. One at Zazzle. Another at Redbubble.
The first week that I was putting together my Zazzle store I made a lot of products. Unfortunately they didn’t all become publically available quickly. My first 29 items appeared promptly enough. Then, from Saturday to Thursday, nothing loaded. I looked at the Zazzle forums and checked with customer service and got that slow load times during busy periods could be expected. By Wednesday I was feeling a bit itchy so I decided to check out the other POD sites that I’d seen recommended.
I started setting up a store at Redbubble. I’d only set up a profile but not loaded any art when Zazzle’s public links resolved and the 50 products I’d been waiting on became available. So I continued making stuff at Zazzle. I decided to just make one or two things a day. Partly so that they’d load in a timely fashion and partly so I would spend some time figuring out best marketing practices. And I got a commission to do illustrations for an RPG supplement about pirates.
Redbubble is persistent though. I got emails reminding me to finish setting up my store. So, what the hell, I figured I might as well have two stores, one Zazzler, one Redbubbler. Zazzle had been recommended as a general, less focussed site, Redbubble as an artist focused site. There’s definitely a difference between them.
With Zazzle, you choose a product – a cup, a t-shirt, a puzzle – upload an image and match it to the product. With Redbubble you start by uploading an image and the site helpfully puts it on EVERYTHING. For a few of their products that means you have to do some repositioning to make the image look good. Most of the time the fit is great. Zazzle seems to be the best platform for smaller images, the sort of things that I’ve been putting on cups and mugs. Redbubble seems to be a better platform for larger, more complicated images. So those are good reasons to maintain two stores.
Zazzle provides code that lets me post individual items or collections to this website or other social media sites. That’s cool.
This week’s gallery is another collection of the daily sketches I did in 2019. This is the fourth gallery.
Story Seed #49 Write Like An Animal
Watership Down. Duncton Wood. Tailchaser’s Song. These are novels that feature animals as protagonists. Specifically, these stories feature anthropomorphic animal societies that keep more to the “natural” versions of the featured animals rather than human societies in animal drag i.e. Wind in the Willows or the Redwall series. Watership Down is a survival adventure story starring rabbits. Duncton Wood is a mythic fantasy featuring moles. Tailchaser’s Song is a claw and sorcery tale starring cats. These are the books that come to mind because I’ve read them. There are many others.
Animals are social creatures. They all have some sort of society, a way of interacting with each other. So pick a species and tell a tale. Mice? Bears? Elephants? Possums? What sort of cultures would these critters have? What kind of adventures (or romances or domestic dramas) would they experience?
I find that thinking like an animal often helps me to understand and sympathize with my fellow humans. Despite some of our fellows’ claims to contrary, humans are animals. Animals are people. And people have stories.
Recommendation : Charles Stross
Charles Stross is a writer based in Scotland. He’s known for a couple of series – The Laundry Files (horror/espionage) and The Merchant Princes (science fiction/space opera). His blog is a good source of commentary on the business of writing and the political scene in the UK.
Local News
I think of myself as having three jobs. The first and most time consuming job is as a mail carrier. That’s the one that gives me income to pay my bills and look after my family. The second job is as a “creative person”. Mostly that’s creating illustrations and cartoons. Sometimes that’s doing designwork or writing stories. It’s a job that both brings in some extra income and keeps me sane. I do it more for the sanity keeping than for the extra income. The process of drawing is mostly relaxing and mostly quiets my mind even if the rest of the day has been filled with stupidity. On those occasions when drawing is frustrating, when I’m trying to draw something unfamiliar or really complicated, the process still takes quiets my mind and focuses it on a specific task.
My third job is marketing my second job. It’s the job for which I have the least time. Marketing can be sending out announcements about one’s skills and talents. Marketing can be a more direct process of contacting potential clients and flashing your portfolio at them. As much as possible I combine both my second and third job. Last year I posted a drawing a day here. This year I’m writing this newsletter. The drawing/writing of random things is a pleasant activity. Regular posting keeps eyes on this site and makes me more visible to search engines. So I hear anyway.
I finished my last illustration for The Lovecraft County Holiday Collection a couple of weeks ago. It’s a week until the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter launches. The campaign will last 30 days. Assuming it funds at the correct stretch goal, I’ll have some more illustrations to do.
In the meantime I’m working on concept art for Kaiju Weather, a graphic novel that I’m writing with my wife. The concept art is to help her see the world of the story the way I see it. It’s a huge project. Finishing it will take a few years. I will post the concept art when there’s enough of it (and we’re farther along in the rest of book) over at our Kaiju Weather page. I’m currently expecting to start doing that in January, 2022. Yeah, I’m thinking long term.
I’m also in the process of putting together a Zazzle shop. I’ll provide a link when there’s something to sell. Right now I’m working on designs and figuring out products. That means I have to think and learn. I love thinking and learning! I just wish I didn’t need solitary, quiet time to do it. I don’t have a lot of that. Still, I should have some merchandise available before the end of this summer.
Thank you for dropping by. It’s a chaotic world out there. Keep yourself safe and reach out to your friends. We’ll make it if we hang togehter.
Here are another thirty of the sketches that I posted on a daily schedule last year, now in a convenient gallery so you don’t have to scroll through posts day by day.
Story Seed #47 Music of Mystery
A couple has purchased a big house. It had previously been a rental with multiple tenants. Not all the tenants took their stuff with them when they moved out so the couple is having to clear out the abandoned belongings as they move in. They find a box with a couple dozen cassette tapes. The cases are labeled with a list of the songs on each tape. The couple doesn’t recognize any of the songs. Out of curiosity they decide to play the tapes to find out what the music sounds like.
From there the story can go many directions –
The tapes are filled with amazing songs and the couple are compelled to track down the original albums that the music came from.
The songs listed aren’t actually songs. They’re weird interviews that reveal secrets that the couple wishes that did not now know.
The songs alter the couples thoughts and moods, slowly driving thiem insane and/or sparking epiphanies that lead them to enlightenment.
The music on the tapes is strange and obscure. The couple is inspired to track down the original albums and, in the process, they discover hidden worlds and forgotten histories.
Every time one of the tapes is played, something changes in the house. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for worse. Sometimes simply for strange.
????
Recommendation
My brother, Glenn, used to blog regularly. Him starting a blog is what inspired me to start blogging. He’s got two blogs: Lovesettlementand Dare I Read? In recent years he’s left them quiet. Until the coronapocalypse and the California Lockdown. What’s been bad for “normal life” has sparked him to do more posting. He uses Lovesettlement to post about his poetry. Dare I Read? is where he posts a wider range of thoughts.
He’s been called back to work so the blogs have been quiet again but there’s enough interesting stuff up that visting is worthwhile.
Local News
A good way to start thinking of all the ways I might be screwing up at my job is to have the boss say as she walks by my case, “Come see me in the office before you leave today”. That happened to me on Wednesday. And I spent a bunch of time trying to think of what I might have done wrong. Too many u-turns? Too much office time? My delivery time isn’t matching the metrics that corporate thinks it should?
Nah.
Turns out she wanted to give a me a certificate of appreciation for the extra work I do beyond delivering my own route. With mail volumes down I often have undertime available and I volunteer to carry parts of other routes in that undertime. It was a pleasant surprise to get acknowledged for that.
On Thursday the boss gave out small gift certificates to those carriers who had scanned 100% of their packages in the last month and slightly smaller certificates to those who had managed 99% scans. I’m a 99%er.
On Saturday we were given new procedures for how and when we’re supposed to sort our mail and parcels. I’m not going to try to explain the details. Mostly it’s an attempt by management to get the carriers to do our “office time” work during a designated “office time” and everything else during “street time”. I have to compliment our stations managers for actually taking carrier complaints into account and restructuring the way the clerks sort parcels to try to accomodate the new mandates. Past managers have have heard the same complaints and just shrugged.
On Sunday I finished the last illustration for the Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. Now the clock is ticking until the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter launches on August 1st. I will have more to say about that as the date approaches.
Today is my day off. I made a batch of bacon bits – 1 pound pork bacon plus 2 pounds turkey bacon, chopped and baked for a couple hours at 375 degrees. I’ll use those as a garnish for the next couple weeks. I also made a huge lasagna. Five layers of noodles and homemade sauce and five types of cheese. That’s lunch for the next ten days.
And that’s another week gone. I hope yours had more high points than low ones. And I hope that the coming week looks bright. There’s a lot of nonsense happening in the world right now but there’s also a lot of beauty and brilliance. We’re all in this together and when we remember that, we thrive.
From last year, the second set of thirty daily/half hour sketches. Do you have any favorites?
Story Seed #45 A Bad Seed Blooms
Karren was always a difficult child. Demanding, clingy, prone to throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. Dealing with her on a daily basis was enough to convince her parents that they didn’t want to have another child. Yes she was often charming. Yes she was usually very entertaining and she could seem very loving but, damn, she was awfully narcissistic.
When Karren was eight, her mother became pregnant (their contraception method failed) and her parents decided that they’d keep the baby. Karren would adapt, she’d have to. Right? And for a while it seemed like Karren would. She was delighted by the idea of having a sibling. She had fun playing nursemaid and helper to her mother and she revelled in the appreciation that her parents showed her for her new attitude.
The baby came, a little sister. Karren played doting big sister, giving cuddles, helping with bottles and rocking her to sleep. But, her parents had less attention for her and got crankier form lack of sleep, the old Karren resurfaced. She was jealous of the baby, angry that it just wouldn’t behave. Her play became meaner and rougher. One morning her mother caught her holding a pillow over the baby’s face. She wasn’t trying to kill the baby, she was just trying to make it stop crying, she didn’t know what she was doing, did she?
Her parents made arrangements to send Karren to a boarding school. Until she could depart her parents never left her alone with the baby and they locked her room at night.
Two days before Karren was to depart her mother took her and the baby to run errands. Karren had been behaving. She seemed contrite. Maybe safe? As they returned to the house their car was blocked in by a pair of black SUVs and armed men pulled them from the vehicle.
Karren’s parents were comfortably upper middle class. Karren’s grandfather, her father’s father, was rich and had made a lot of enemies getting that way. The kidnappers were in the employ of a Russian gangster that Grandfather had doublecrossed.
Karren, her mother and her little sister are taken to a remote location. Karen’s mother is forced to record a ransom plea. Karren pouts, Karren yells, Karren is not a cooperative hostage. The kidnappers beat her, tie her up, cut off one of her little fingers and send it with the ransom demand.
Karren’s father is in shock and desperate. Grandfather is disappointed. His son was always a weak thing. Grandfather harrumphs and takes charge. He has his security chief put together a team to rescue the kidnapped mother and her girls. But Grandfather didn’t get rich by giving a shit about anyone but himself. The team is to rescue the family if it’s convenient but it’s more important to him that they kill as many of the Russians as they can. The “girls” are expendable.
And Karren? Karren is very, very mad. Her parents could be boring. Her parents could be strict. Her parents often spoiled her fun. But they’d never hit her. They’d never hurt her. And now these smelly men have dared to hurt HER and threaten HER mother and HER little sister?
Karren is clever. Karren will get out of her bounds. Karren will make them all very, very sorry.
Recommendation
I am behind on my newsletters. I have a virtual stack of them waiting to be read and, at the moment, I can’t remember which ones I’ve already recommended. So this week I’m recommending a youtube channel: Cartoonist Kayfabe. Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor are veteran comics creators and they regular post a lot of videos about comics. I’ll let them introduce themselves –
Local News
I don’t have heroes. When I was a kid I kept discovering that the folks my history classes promoted as role models were often pretty horrible people. Even the ones the weren’t horrible were usually … human. That is, they weren’t necessarily nice, they weren’t always faithful and they often did things that were sloppy and stupid. As a kid, I was looking for perfect heroes to model myself after and real humans just kept failing provide me with the examples I wanted.
As I grew up I came to admire the people who stood up, who took action to make the world a better place, regardless of whether they were also shitty spouses, terrible parents or lousy friend. Rather, I’ve learned to admire the noble actions they took and accept that the rest of their lives and behaviors were probably pretty messy.
I’ve been following and reading Warren Ellis‘s work since I encountered his columns at 9th Art back in the 90s. I posted some art in the Remake/Remodel challenges in the FreakAngels forums. I found a lot of interesting newsletters (and was inspired to do this one) because he recommended them. I don’t get many regular comics these days but I did pay attention to what he had coming out next. I mostly heard about that when I read his latest newsletter. I only heard about the controversy when he posted his last one. This essay gives the pertinent details with links to more info.
Of all the bad actors who have come in to light in the last few years, Ellis is the first one whose work really matters to me. After a few days passage I’m still … I don’t know. I believe the women. You don’t get 30 or more artists to agree on something unless there is truth there. And they’ve got the emails. (And being a whistleblower is never about money unless you’re already rich and famous. Being a poor whistleblower means you, at best, become a famous and poor whistleblower. Anyone who thinks that someone calls out injustice for fame and glory and wealth is someone who doesn’t actually care about injustice.)
I admire his work. I’m sorry he’s behaved poorly and kind of relieved that he didn’t behave worse. I sympathize more with the women who had to put up with his shit than with him for what’s happening now. What struck me, in his statement, was this –
“I have never considered myself famous or powerful, to the point where I’ve made a lot of bad jokes about it for twenty-odd years.”
It’s a reminder to me that our perceptions of ourselves are often off the mark. You might think that someone in Ellis’ position, who has had the accomplishments and influence that he’s had, would have a better perception of his place in the world. But most of us don’t. Most of us hear our internal dialogues, our fears and our doubts, much louder than the feedback we get from the outside. We rarely perceive ourselves accurately.
It’s a reminder that I/we have much more power in the world than I/we think I/we do. It’s a reminder to be more aware, to think before speaking and acting. It’s a reminder to talk more about perceptions and expectations even when doing that seems like it’s going to kill the flow of an interaction. I may think things are hunky dory but the person I’m with might just be being polite.
I don’t think I’m currently in a position of power. In previous jobs I have been a supervisor and an assistant manager and a manager. As I moved up in responsibility I became conscious of having a responsibility to model “professional” behavior. Getting wasted and flirting with one’s coworkers isn’t a good look for the boss. Now I’m just one mail carrier in a station of about a hundred other carriers. I go to work. I don’t really socialize. I just want to put the hours in so I can get paid and go home and draw. Do I have power? Of course I do. I’m an older white guy who, to the new hires at least, probably seems like I’ve been around forever. Postal carriers have a union. Carriers advance by seniority. There’s a culture of not ratting on your fellow carrier when they misbehave. So I maybe could fuck with the new hires and get away with it. I’m pretty sure that veteran carriers already do that.
I have gotten tired. I have withdrawn. But I’m not dead. It’s time to pay a little more attention at work and in the world. I am not a hero. But I do have power and I can take a few noble actions now and then.
I had wanted to participate in Drawlloween/Inktober 2018. I like to do a little prep for sustained events so, earlier in the year, I’d checked to see if prompts had been posted for either challenge. Nothing. Checked again. Nothing. And then I forgot until October was a couple of days old. Joining in on October 2nd would have meant I was playing catch up. I hate playing catch up. I shrugged and figured, “Next year.”
A couple of days went by and the thought became, “All year.” Instead of drawing and posting an image a day in October of 2018, I decided to post an image a day in 2019. My parameters would be simple: spend no more than a half an hour on each sketch. By starting to do the sketches in early October I’d have enough of a headstart that I was sure I’d be able to manage the pace.
I posted an image a day, every day, in 2019. I actually only did 362 half hour sketches. I misnumbered a couple of my scans midway through and didn’t realize the mistake until I got the end of the year. For December 29th and 30th I posted a couple of more complex illustrations that I finished for the occasion. December 31st was a blank image – New Year, New Possibilities.
The sketches can be seen if you look at the daily posts here for 2019. To simplify things I’m going to be posting galleries of the 30 images at a time, 12 galleries total, between now and the end of 2020. This is the first one.
Story Seed 43
Exploring the Last Sky Jungle
In November 1913, The Strand Magazine published Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Horror of the Heights. At the time airplanes were novel machines and few people had flown in them. Sure, the idea that there might be entire ecosystems up there above the clouds seemed implausible but that part of the world was unexplored enough that it wasn’t completely impossible. I read it when I was a kid, probably sometime in the 1970s. By then the airline industry was well established and the idea that huge creatures were living in the stratosphere was, at best, quaint.
The skies are full of planes and, as far as we know, no one has been attacked by any air predators. Not recently. There are two possibilities why –
The 20th century air pollution and the airline industry destroyed the sky ecosystems and by the 21st century all those animals are extinct. The aerohabitats were always fragile things. The toxins that rose into the upper atmosphere killed them. Faster and stronger airplanes tore through flocks of the creatures without the pilots even realizing it. Some of the larger and speedier beasts were mistaken for aircrafts and labeled “UFO”s.
The aerohabits existed and continue to exist just outside our perception. They were seen by early aeronauts because the lack of oxygen, greater exposure to cosmic radiation and other effects of the upper atmosphere created heightened perception. The aeronauts saw things that, with better, safer equipment, are no longer seen.
So that gives us two obvious possibilities for stories –
There are places in the atmosphere where few planes fly and where the air is less polluted. I tried doing some quick googling to find out what parts of the world see the least airplanes but came up short of useful info. The Antarctic skies is probably one region. There’s a big chunk of the Pacific Ocean with no islands and therefore no spots to refuel. I looked at satellite images of those areas in Google maps and the photos there are really low rez. Humans don’t watch the places where humans don’t go. So now you’d just need a reason to have someone go there and discover the last Aerojungle.
H.P. Lovecraft’s story From Beyond features a device called the Tillenghast Resonator. When activated the resonator allows a human being to see the creatures that exist beyond our normal, limited perception. An aeronaut in a new, experimental ultralight craft, attempting to make a new altitude record, finds him/herself in the middle of an aerohabit. The craft was accidentally constructed in such a way to alter the pilot’s perceptions and senses. The pilot can now see the air beasts. And the air beasts can now see the pilot.
Recommendations
This week I’m going to recommend avoiding Facebook. Plenty of other folks have made this suggestion. The thing is designed to keep you scrolling and I find that my attention span gets shorter the longer I’m visiting it. Last week, rather than jumping on FB first thing in the morning while my coffee woke me up, I read one or two of the newsletters that I’ve been recommending. More focused. A longer read. And, once I’d finished a newsletter, it was easier to write or work on art until I had to make breakfast.
This Week
My union has won arbitration on management’s “Consolidated Casing Initiative”. All 61 stations that have tried to implement this terrible plan are going to reconvert to regular casing and delivery. My station was on the list to join this “experiment” and I’m feeling nothing but relief.
I can think of a number of ways to improve our office and street times but, in my observation, management doesn’t ask the carriers how we could improve service. So we do the best we can.
The week has been mostly uneventful personally. The cat that was chewing on the base of his tail got a shot of steroids and antibiotics and a medicated cream that we applied on the spot for a week. The raw spots have healed and his fur is growing back. The cat that needs electrolyte infusions continues to tolerate them. He doesn’t seem to love us any less afterward.
The protests and curfews slowed down the care packages from my Big Sister this week but she did bring us salmon cakes and a chicken mushroom new potato pie. On Sunday I made up a stir fry to go with the cakes. I’m looking forward to having the pie tonight.
Nationally it’s been a mess. If you’re paying attention you know what I mean. I hope that there are positive results from all this. I don’t dislike the police in general but I also don’t trust them in general. The few times I’ve been pulled over here in Seattle the cops have been polite and easy going. But I’m an older white guy. I know my experience isn’t the experience of others. I had different experiences when I was in my teens and twenties in small towns in California. My friends and I often wandered the streets at night and occasionally got stopped. I was never arrested but the cops were often confrontational, unnecessarily so. I got lucky.
If you’re out there protesting, thank you for your service. Change is inevitable, positive change requires positive intention. Constant positive intention. Stay safe. Look out for each other. The monsters win until they lose. And they always lose.
Have no fear of the blank page. It is your friend. It is the glorious mistake waiting to be made. The discovery unexpected. A glimpse of the universe asking you to reveal it. Love the empty page for everything that it can be.
Then find out what that page is holding within it.
