I was delighted to learn that my daily art yesterday reminded Julie Pascal of a story she had written. You can read it at her blog, and I recommend you do, it’s very good. Like many short pieces, it will leave you thinking ‘what comes next?’ but it’s satisfying in its entirety.
The Ship was all that Malene had ever known and she knew it very well. As an infant she learned its sounds, the motor hums, droning fans, snaps and pings. The constant low vibration of the main drive sounded to her as the blood coursing through a mother’s arteries sounds to the unborn.
In toddlerhood she learned the spaces, the nooks and crannies. She learned the places of safety and the places of danger and what to never touch.
As a small child she learned to read and to understand, to use the computer consoles, to tend the plants and protein vats. She learned where her fathers went when they left, and she learned where the new fathers came from. The placard next to the door said, “Cryonics Bay.”Read the whole story for free here.
As I was working on this art, which started out as a classroom doodle and by the end of the day had blossomed into a cyborg creation of traditional art and digital, the title in my head was “Madonna of the Spaceways” which I could swear I’d read somewhere, either as a title of a story, or in a story. Does anyone know if this exists? I’m not happy with the art – making daily art means that sometimes I produce real stinkers – but the concept was nifty. Julie’s story is lovely, and for nothing else, I’m glad this piece of art prompted her to finish her story and make it public.
Art and fiction marry well. An image may be worth far more than it’s allotted thousand words, sometimes. Most of my art is shallow, a simple snapshot of some ephemeral beauty of a flower, or a cutesy visual joke. But I can’t deny that art taps into the same part of me that puts forth stories, and it’s the unexpected upwellings like this image that make me think I’ll be writing again, once I regain my equilibrium. And perhaps I need to plan a trip to a museum, to tap into the stories other artists have trapped in their images, and prime the story-pump of my own.
Also, I think I need to publish Mindflow. One of my earliest stories, it is on the same vein as Julie’s, and it is very close to the art. Funny how some themes stick with you and come up again and again. The collection that now includes Mindflow will be a free download – a gift to you, my readers.