New MEMORY! Now with illustrations!

Howdy folks! Things have been challenging on my end of late. Yes, I know I missed publishing a new installment of MEMORY last week. My bad. But as I've mentioned previously, my photography and art courses I'm taking this semester can be quite time-consuming, and several time-intensive projects converged to hammer me big time last week. This week was only slightly better.

There's a silver lining, though. In my art class, I perverted an ongoing, multi-stage project into a chance to illustrate some of my fiction, select characters from MEMORY being among the subjects. It just so happens that one character, a Naga-ed-der who shows up in this week's installment at No Fear of the Future, is one that I chose to illustrate. Neat-o, as they say.

Interesting thing about the artistic process. You've all seen book covers and illustrations that in no, way, shape or form conform to the descriptions in the book itself. We've all griped about them. Even fairly literal interpretations of scenes and characters often take artistic license in obvious and dramatic ways. Well, I'm the author and the artist, so my pen-and-ink efforts (feeble tho they may be) should have no problem faithfully replicating that what is represented by the written word.

Well, not exactly. Turns out I was more interested in an illustration that was more representative, in general, than specific. In short, I took artistic liberties and deviated from what I wrote, for reasons including (but not limited to) practicality of composition, the mood I was trying to convey and pleasure of the artistic process itself. I know what you're thinking: If you ran into a Naga-ed-der at, say, your neighborhood Applebees, would it look like the illustration? Well, yes. More or less. But there's plenty of leeway in there for other artists in the future to bring their own interpretation to the gallery without being "wrong" (as if that's ever going to be a concern).

The more important point in the above discussion is wholly missed by the whole fixation on illustration accuracy, however. A Naga-ed-der would never be caught dead in an Applebee's, or a Bennigan's or TGI Friday's or any other so-called "fern bar" eatery. A Ruth's Chris Steakhouse is probably as lowbrow as one would go, and that's pushing it. They'd gravitate more toward fusion cuisine, anyway, so I suppose that's a moot point.

Amid the steam and smoke and clanging noise, a circular balcony filled the center of the kitchen. Here nearly a dozen aerial waiters worked rapidly, taking serving trays from peq and diving over the edge, tethered by silken threads from their tail spinnerets anchored to the balcony railing.

“Excusing me,” Parric said to a passing peq loaded down with some purple, tuberish vegetable that appeared disturbingly phallic. “I am needing to speak--”

“Ours is only to serve, sir, and we are serving now,” the peq said with a courteous but unmistakably dismissive nod, then continued on its way.

“I...” Parric started, but the peq had already vanished amid the chaos. Clicking his beak in annoyance, Parric pushed his way through disinterested peq to the one chef that seemed to exude the most authority. “Excusing me--”

“Who let this one in here?” the chef grunted loudly without looking from his confections. His orange skin glistened wetly from the steam. “Have the doorman escort it out.”

The entirety of chapter 26 can be read over at No Fear of the Future.

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