Washington D.C

As some may know, the Spring Valley high school band recently went on a trip to our nation's capital. We've been practicing various patriotic songs and marches over the course of the past few months, and our plan was to play at the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Over the course of the trip, myself and everyone else found ourselves gazing at some of the most interesting and historic sites in the country, brushing elbows with an incredibly diverse rage of people from various countries around the world, and becoming so sleep-deprived that it's not even funny any more.
From start to finish, here's the story....

....March 23rd, 2013--Day 1

Tensions were high at the start of the trip, as can be expected. Chaperones were beginning to realize just how much work was cut out for them to keep twenty-odd restless teenage kids together, and it was dawning on all of us that we were going to be a long way from home for a long time. The bus was a little late, but the loading process was about as streamlined it could be under circumstances, and soon we were on our way.




Night one we spent on the bus. Most people slept upright in their seats. I, personally, am incapable of sleeping upright. There's always some part of me pressing harder against the seat than the rest, and so I end up with weird cramps and numb spots. I eventually moved to the floor, and spent the night rolling around amongst our luggage and banging my head against the underside of the seat. Needless to say, I got very little sleep.

March 24th--Day 2
We drove most of the day, and I lost count of how many states we passed through. Eventually, we ended up in Pennsylvania, where we stopped at Gettysburg and took a tour of the battlefield. The tour guide was interesting; he talked loudly and animatedly, and he had a tendency to mumble-chuckle at his own jokes every once in a while. After the tour, we ate at General Pickett's Buffet (which was better than the name may suggest). We made it to the hotel around seven or eight o'clock, and I played a lively game of 'Splenda' (better known as 'spoons') with my roommates before eventually going to bed.

March 25th--Day 3
I was, until this day, unaware that one's feet could hurt so much.

The day started with a tour of Mt. Vernon. We walked through the house itself (which felt odd--I felt as if I was intruding on someone's home without their permission), and then were given free reign to wander around the estate. The local flora was interesting--I noted the usual maples and oaks, but also sycamores, holly, and magnolias, which you don't see too much of in the midwest. There were interesting buildings and even some barns that were still in use, and I heard rumors that George's dentures were somewhere on display in the visitor's center.

Next on the itinerary was the Smithsonian, my personal favorite. We wandered through the American History museum, and saw Dorothy's shoes from The Wizard of Oz and Kermit the Frog. The rest of the day I spent in the Natural History museum with a fellow natural science nerd. There was everything there from ancient, fossilized mammal skeletons from the Pleistocene to a zoo full of insects and arthropods, and I even caught a passing glimpse of the Hope Diamond (there were so many people crowded around it, a glimpse was all you could ever get). For lunch, I had the most expensive apple and cookie I've ever eaten, and for supper, we went to Union Station.
Back at the hotel, we stayed up a little later than we should have building a fort out of the bed mattresses.

March 26th--Day 4
My memory of the chronological order of this day is mixed up, because I wrote it a day late and the itinerary was switched around due to weather.
To the best of my knowledge, we started out the day at Arlington cemetery, where we witnessed the changing of the guard ceremony and saw the Eternal Flame and the Kennedy burial spot. The Lincoln memorial was next, where we played our songs (despite the attempts by the wind to send our music spinning off into the reflecting pool), and then walked around the park that surrounded the memorial and saw the Vietnam wall. Next was the Iwo Jima memorial and the statue of the six soldiers raising the American flag. According to our guide, one of them was actually from Antigo, Wisconsin, though I couldn't quite figure out which. Lunch was at a renovated Post Office that had been turned into a mall, where we ate some blessedly reasonably-priced food and were ushered into various souvenir stands by some of the pushiest vendors I've ever come across.
We ended the day at the Toby's dinner theater, where we saw a very well-done production of Fiddler on the Roof. The food was good, the actors surprisingly similar to those in the movie, and I even had a chance to leave behind a napkin with my blog address and a myriad of doodles (If you found it, tell me!). By the time we got home, it was 11:54, and I could barely walk, let alone think.

March 27th--Day 5
This was the last day in the hotel, and subsequently the last chance I had of getting any decent sleep. We hurriedly packed in the morning and did a quick sweep of the hotel room, and then loaded up everything onto the bus once more and set off for our last day of touring. We went back to the Smithsonian first, and I went off with the group that went to the National Archives. We arrived a half hour before the place even opened, and even so, the line extended half a block around the building. It grew even longer as the day went on. Once inside, we saw the Bill of Rights, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and even the Magna Carta, among other things. One thing I found interesting was the speech that was written during the Apollo missions as backup in case they didn't come back....
We trudged on to the Air and Space museum next, and saw a few of the major items like the Wright Flyer and Amelia Earhart's plane. Regrettably, we couldn't stay long, because we were running short on time and we hadn't yet gotten a close look at the Capitol building. We did a quick walk around the perimeter, and observed the various protests going on at the steps. After loading up the bus again, we went, in quick sequence, to the White House, Jefferson Memorial, Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, and Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. By that point, I was once again dead on my feet, and grateful when we finally got on the bus again and headed home.

The rest is pretty uninteresting--another night sleeping on the floor of the bus, a relieved homecoming, and finally sleeping in my own bed for the first time in five days. In short, it was a great trip, but man am I glad to be back. My congratulations and thanks to Ms Donna Dawson (the band director), for putting together yet another successful band trip and for putting up with us for five whole days.

Journals

I've decided to post a day early, seeing as how there appears to be some upcoming circumstances that might prevent me from posting during my usual time (Namely, that I'm going to be in Washington D.C for a week on a band trip. My next post will be an account of that adventure). Otherwise, things will be progressing according to schedule--the next chapter of Centaur Ranch is up, and I encourage you to read and offer comments on it.

For this week, I've decided to post something that I've been working on for so long, it doesn't even register as a project in my mind--my journals. Those who know me well are probably accustomed to the presence of one or more journals that I always carry around. Sometimes, they'll see me writing in them, other times consulting in them, and people will ask me if they're diaries. Yes, in a way.
I keep idea journals. They aren't accounts of my day-to-day activities. Rather, they're accounts of what's going on in my brain. I write down words or facts that strike me as interesting, random phrases that pop into my head, or even entire short stories or snippets of dialogue from full books. I make a point of never writing down full-length novels in them. I prefer them to be a jumble of ideas, both in writing and as drawings, that I can look back on later and use in other full books. A typical page may look something like this:

 The drawings aren't my best, and there's scribbles and corrections galore in the writing, but as a whole, I regard the journals as works of art.

                

                         So far, I've managed to fill two....

...And I have a third in reserve.

I owe my thanks to my cousin, for giving me the green one for Christmas two years ago, and to Poetic Earth Handcrafted Journals, from whom I bought the red and yellow journals at an art fair. My intention is to someday present these various sources with the filled journals, and declare to them, "Here. I fixed it."

Creature from the Past

Here's another short story, written after watching video footage of a huge chunk of glacier calving off its parent and tumbling into the sea. At points, it looked to me like some huge creature breaching the water and then sinking back under the waves. I simply illustrated it literally for this story, and then let the story take me where it would...

 

Creature from the Past

            The creature breached the surface of the water with a terrific rush of water. Its humped black back appeared out of the white crests of foam, the ancient skin lined with white scars from great battles past and encrusted with barnacles. A single eye appeared—surprisingly small for something so huge—,its surface a deep gold with copper flecks. It watched the sailors as its head surged into the open air and a spray of mist shot into the air from its blowhole. It heaved a great breath into its lungs—lungs so huge, a single gulp of air could last it for millennia—the noise a deep, rumbling moan that sent deep shock waves rippling through the ocean and made the seabed tremble thousands of feet below the water’s surface.

            The sailors watched the creature with a deep sense of awe, even as they knew that it was the last thing they would ever see. One of them had a photo of his wife in his hand. Another thought of a bar tab he’d left unpaid at a pub back on shore. The captain simply touched his fingers lightly to the railing of his beloved ship. They all watched in silence as the beast finished drawing in a lungful of air, and they watched as it slowly sank back beneath the waves.

            Like a sinking island, the monster’s back plunged back into the depths of the ocean, the foaming whitecaps closing over its black hide and swirling downward with the creature’s body in a powerful whirlpool. The little fishing ship and its twelve occupants were caught in the current, and were swept inwards and downwards after the great beast of the sea like a leaf being swept away by a stream. The hull dipped when they reached the center, and the rest of the ship shortly followed. When the water finally closed over the stern of the ship and the last bit of driftwood was sucked downward into the whirlpool, the waves surged back up and slowly settled, leaving little more than a few bubbles and a lonely seagull to tell the tale.

            Once more, the great kraken slept, and with it, all those who might of spoken of its return to the surface.

THE END

As usual, the next chapter of Centaur Ranch is up. To anyone who's picking it up right in the middle , I advise you to find the e-book on lulu.com and read the whole thing from start to finish.

A Chair Named Balthazar...

"You may not want to sit in Balthazar, dear," Aunt Beatrice said. "He doesn't like strangers."
Milly stopped and stared at the chair.
"You named it?" she asked incredulously.
"Him, dear," Aunt Beatrice corrected. "And of course I named him. You named your dog Goldie, didn't you?"
"But Goldie's alive," Milly argued.
"So is Balthazar."
As if in agreement, the old armchair gave a soft, creaking mutter, and flexed its curled armrests like hands. The claw-carved feet underneath it bent in a way that wood shouldn't have been able to, and the entire chair shuffled sideways a little so that it was clear to Milly that it wasn't going to let her sit in it. Balthazar sidled across the woven carpet to the other side of the room, and eventually settled near the edge of the couch, where Aunt Beatrice could reach it from where she was sitting. She smiled and gave it an absent pat on the armrest without looking up from her book.
Milly sighed and sat down in a metal folding chair.


I admit it--I was bored when I wrote this. At least I wasn't trying to sleep, and it wasn't 2:00 in the morning when I got the idea.

New Drawing

My apologies for the late posting. I spent the weekend in Milwaukee with the school ocean science club, silently going insane while attempting to wrap my head around the questions being asked at the state competition (our team won, by the way). The trip lasted all weekend, and even though I wasn't actually competing myself, I was beat by the time I got back.

In the meantime, I offer up for your consideration the diopteron:

 

"The diopterons were not a species to be taken lightly. Many people had an innate fear of the mammoth, bearlike creatures, and as well they did. The breed was only slightly removed from their wild cousins, the tanterons--the wild cat-beasts of the forest. A lot of the natural instincts involving ripping the limbs off anything that threatened them were left in the domesticated species. That was part of the reason the troupe had chosen one to pull their wagon instead of horses."

The diopterons will be pack animals in a new world that I'm in the process of creating. They're huge, temperamental and highly intelligent animals that have evolved without eyes. The circus troupe upon which the story will focus will use one as a draft animal to pull their cart, mostly to fend off thieves and offer protection when sheltering in the wilds. There will be a lot of other huge creatures in this world--mostly mammals, after the Pleistocene era--along with other interesting phenomena such as seasonal fire storms and immortal prophets. I don't have all the details down quite yet, so I won't spoil too much more. 

Otherwise, the next chapter of Centaur Ranch is up. Diddle's off to rescue his friend from the clutches of the Shreeks, a band of huge, white, blind lizard creatures that raided the ranch. If you haven't read the first chapters of the book, the e-book is on sale at lulu.com. Search keywords are "Centaur, Centaur Ranch, and Diddle."

The Great Jacket Project

 I can't believe I've never thought of this before.

For the longest time, I've had a pale gray American Eagle sweatshirt that I got second-hand from a friend. The other day, during English class, I was wearing this sweatshirt, and in my right hand, I was holding a sharpie. I was staring at the cuff of the sweatshirt, and I was seized by the sudden urge to draw all over it. It then occurred to me that the entire sweatshirt was a huge, blank canvas just waiting to be drawn on.

 At home, I found that I had a package of mostly unused fabric markers. I dug these out of a closet, and set to work drawing vines on the cuffs of the sleeves. My original intention was to do vines all down the arms and over the shoulders, but another idea occurred to me. Before I knew it, I had a squid down one arm, a lizard down the other, a cat on the hood, and a stag beetle on the back. I also filled in the eagle outline on the front, and added a little fish with a wide-eyed look of terror for it to chase.

 Basically, this is how I've spent my Saturday.

I started this one as a rough sketch in a notebook when I had five minutes left of Chemistry class. I had the idea of doing a fairy with the features of a dragonfly, and worked it into the drawing with the double wings, the layered plates on the chest, and the thick tail.
As to the creature's story, I haven't really come up with much for that. I suspect it will be part of the story with the nighthawk warriors, and it will be a distant relative to the wingless fey folk. Beyond that, I'll need to start writing the story itself to figure out the abilities and personalities of these creatures.

On another note, the latest chapter of Centaur Ranch is up. The plot has been advancing towards the climactic finale, with Diddle unearthing some of the plans his uncle has been making for himself and the ranch. After a fight between a somewhat less than congenial genie and a vengeful flaming balefire, Diddle's now on his way to tell Nero what he learned while hiding in the dumbwaiter in his uncle's secret room. What happens next? Better read to find out.