Damn I Am Pretty Art Laboratories

Bit of short fiction this week.  A tale from the Secret Histories, the Historica Arcanum, as written and forgotten both long ago and tomorrow.  A tale about Delphi, her many lives and about how a few choices echo through more than one century. You are born in water.  You die made of water.  Water sees you come, and water sees you go.  It is in your eyes, your blood, your soul.  Does it bind you, free you or is it a chain?  If you enjoy this tale, leave a comment and more like it might come this way. 1836 CE The wolf-masked stranger so frightened them, they tied a noose about his neck.  They shoved him off the port bow, letting him drag behind their swift sloop.  Slaves below deck heard their laughter.  The devils riding among the slavers giggled. Then there was a splash from the sea.  Saltwater elongated in a tentacle.  The wolf-masked man rose upon that wave, beside a woman in a blue-gray cloak.  Dolphins of blue,...

I haven't written here in a while. The last two posts were an attempt to get back in the habit again.  I fell off the "creative" horse.  While the idea for a post looking back came to me, I avoided it as being too easy a subject to dwell on.  But, before we get deep into 2019, I guess I should gaze a bit backward. 2018, 2018, 2018 One of the recurring things I heard of 2018 had been that people tended to feel like the year could not yet end.  I never experienced that particular feeling.  2018 felt like 2017, to me, a dark despair sort of lingering, waiting to hit the wall still.  When the dark comes, sometimes you drown in it and can't tell how much time has passed. I fell off of some of my larger creative efforts.  Although friends and Inktober definitely reignited my own efforts.  I felt like 2018 was less productive. than prior years for my art and stories.  Almost all Inktober 2018 of mine was a comic.  This marked the first ...

Winter is cold and dark.  The winds howl.  It is the end of time.  The old tales tell that one gives offerings and performs the rites to ask for aid to survive the dark until spring.  Are these tales true or are they demons scratching at the edge of the mind?  Is magic real? Or is it a part of fairy tales meant to pass the cold night along? The Bear and the Nightingale  is an entrancing 2017 novel by Katherine Arden.  The tale starts with a fairy tale told during a cold winter night to pass the time.  That is where it begins.  It sits at a series of crossroads, a historical fiction, yet a fantasy novel.  It is a coming of age story.  Yet it is also a tale about the conflict between Christianity and Russian pagan beliefs. Two Roads Yet One Even the heroine, Vasya , often is a being between so many things that could otherwise define her.  She keeps the monsters at bay and is the wild maiden of her village.   She a...

Sometimes one finds something that clicks.  It finds the empty notch in your skull and completes the circuit.  The circle closes.  The sequence aligns.  You uncover the clue that makes the code make sense.  You decipher something strange, even though the world around you doesn't notice it. I found Gravity Falls .  Well, my younger sister did and thrust it into my orbit.  I didn't know what to expect, and at first sort of it didn't quite click.  But then it did, as many solid animation does, and it sank its roots deep. Gravity Falls , for the uninitiated, is a Disney animated series that ran from 2012 to 2016.  The series is about the summer the 12-year-old Pine fraternal twins spend with their great uncle Stan.  The twins have the usual animated hijinx.  But a serious underlying mythos undergirds the series, starting with hints.  Then it takes over the story with tons of secrets, ciphers and clues the series drops every s...