Clear Skies and Filthy Clothes (DD4, Chapter Two, pages 24-28)

Alexandra and Katerina take a look at a few of the night sky's splendours, and Alexandra's mom moves up the schedule.

(To browse all of the completed pages, simply hit up the DD4 tag!)

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I almost forgot to do this, but this week I revised two pages from Chapter One with new artwork.

One of my goals was to make the town a little more dreary, more in line with the opening of Chapter Two. Having done so, now I'm wondering if I should have made it MUCH more dreary, but my intuition is telling me to not make it cartoonishly miserable, or not to beat the reader over the head with this stuff. I thought about removing the panel of the kids splashing in the water, but that felt untrue—the kids wouldn't care about the fears that plague the adults.

I also wanted to make the family villa look like it does in Chapter Two, I wanted to bring the midshipman into the picture more, and I added some more ships to the harbour to hint that Nikos manages a small fleet (though this only gets a glancing reference in Chapter Two).

Here's the old CH1 p40, followed by the new:

And here's the old CH1 p41, followed by the new:

Maybe the changes are small, but they seemed important when I made them my task.

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We're past the half-way mark on colouring! I'll admit I thought (er, "estimated?" No, "guessed") Chapter Two would be finished by now, but here we are. I'm working hard to hit that balance I mentioned back at the start of the project, where on one hand this doesn't become an endless, life-consuming project… but on the other, that I'm not rushing through pages and ending up with a book I'm not proud of, or that you, Dear Reader, are not proud of.

Speaking of which, I'm especially pleased with the sequence I worked-on this week, which you'll see shortly. It was difficult, but fits solidly in the category of "let's try a weird, fun thing and see how it turns out," one of the early guiding principles around here.

As ever, thank you to everyone for your continuing support as well as all the kind words you offer each week.

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I finished listening to the last of Terry Pratchett's books (THE SHEPHERD'S CROWN) and I've been digging into a bit of what other people have written about his work in general, as well as a long comment thread on Metafilter from when he died. The word "humane" popped up a lot to describe his writing and his body of work, and that feels like a good word to use. Having reached the end of his catalogue (or at least the portion that's easily accessible to me), I'm interested to revisit some of my comments from earlier, when I first started reading (listening).

Compare that to another book I listened to recently, a newer book which I will not name, wherein we meet hapless people who do dumb, self-indulgent things out of fear. You could certainly see the point the author was making, especially if like me you read the literary reviews mid-way through the book. But all it did was make me want more of Vimes' boiling-kettle sense of rightness, or the Witches and Tiffany Aching's sense of care, or even the character of Death's peaceful reliability. Your literary novel about upper-middle-class apathy does not motivate me to do much of anything (except feel a numb sense of inevitability about Western Civilization's collapse), but at the very least Tiffany Aching reminds me to go out and water our young trees, a simple and perhaps inconsequential action in the big picture, but a necessary one that unarguably benefits the trees.

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Everyone water your trees (or do whatever that might metaphorically mean to you)!

🌳
TC