It will be un-edited, first-drafty (draughty - holes in it, get it?), and like un-spellchecked (not a real verb) but what do you think? Will the format of this blog make it too hard to read? 500 words? 1000 words? Any other problems? Benefits?
Here is a sample to get things rolling and see how it works... (about 1100 words, too much?)
Economous
musgrove
© D.M.Cornish
DO NOT PUBLISH OR REPRODUCE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
1st Draft, June 2011-August 2013
1 ~ In the Park
fabulist ~ an imagineer – a maker of images by stylus,
paint, charcoal or any other medium – employed by monster-hunting teratologists
to go with them upon their dangerous exploits, observe their daring and make
drawings and etchings of the same to prove to safe-living city folk of their
praise-worthy prowess. Being a fabulist means therefore sharing all the dangers
and hardships of your patron teratologist, and with it some hope of a healthy
share of the accompanying rewards. For the true imagineer, however, it is not
the promise of wealth that is the greatest draw, but the challenge of placing
yourself in the very midst of the danger to draw a duel between patron and
monster, and capture the as truly as possible at the very height and thrill of
the violence.
Economous Musgrove,
illustrator, some-time concometrist and would-be fabulist, sat quietly on a
simple bench a little way in from the east gate of the Moldwood Park in the
grand and ancient city of Brandenbrass and drew. He was well aware of the
cleveland’s solemn reputation as a queer and unpleasant place, preserved by
some ancient bond and stubbornly threwdish, despite centuries of encirclement
by one of the world’s great cities. Indeed, surrounded by buzzing bugs and
drifting pollens, he could feel a subtle watchfulness that he now called
normal, brooding from the dark spaces between the olives and sycamores and black
turpentines shaggy with yellowing lichens. It did not seem so unpleasant
a sensation to him as most other folk complained upon. In truth – though he
dare not admit it to anyone not even Asthetica, his true love – Economous actually
liked the feeling of threwd here, as
slight as it may have been. He found it a small but important thrill, giving
him a taste of life as perhaps it ought to be: deep, perhaps impenetrable and
impossibly vital – the stark opposite of the frustrating inertia that seemed to
drag at his own days.
Barefoot, Economous
sat now – shoes under his proofed frockcoat on the bench beside him – drawing
nooks and boles, birds and all manner of crawling things that came his way.
Most of all though, he drew the myriad rabbits great and small that so famously
and helpfully infested this city-bound woodland. Loping from shadow to shadow, ears
switchin ceaselessly forward and back, they grew bolder the longer he sat
there, venturing from folds of thick cabage weed to wriggle their stunt noses
at him. Though never able to pay him for his trouble, these nervous restless
creatures were far less self-conscious or suspicious or given to offence than
the people of this fair city, and they made excellent subjects to draught.
In dull blue-grey
weskit and cotton shirt sleave rolled to elbow in the late spring heat,
Economous strove to get every rabbit he spied down in the very midst of motion
with both the speed and accuracy required for
the drawing of teratologists and their deadly exploits. He could have
sat on any street or lane in the city itself to observe these, for Brandenbrass
was famously over-run with the creatures, even to the obvious and peculiar
exlusion of the far more usual rat that gnawed away at other cities. But where
they were furtive, twitchy and quick to flight in the common ways, in the cool
calm of the Moldwood the city-living rabbits were – contrary to all cause –
calm and almost tame.
Today, however,
his usually quiet, long-eared companions seemed unusually restless, making
themselves hard to draw as they scampered among the roots and leaves, bounding
over each other, breaking out in energetic scuffles Economous had never
previously witnessed. They were bolder too, some daring to graze and frolic
right up by his seat, while out of the deeper shades of the park more rabbits
emerged, playing all about him now in such numbers that set Economous to
marvelling.
Perhaps their spring-time broods have come
out to join them?
Yet he could
not see any small-bodied, big-eyed, short-eared bunnies among the great variety
of creatures gathered, nor even one slender leveret. They were all – as far as
he could reckon it – full grown rabbits.
Economous
paused for a moment, leaning back and rubbing his eyes against the strain of
concentration to which they had been subject for the last two hours.
Though
rigourously schooled as a concometrists at the athenaeum, he spent much of his
apprenticeship drawing rather than measuring or reading or recording as he was
supposed to do. And though he had at the end of his five years there been
granted a numrelogue to record measurements and earned his calibrator – the
thick yard long ruler that was both weapon and tool of a concometrist’s trade,
much of what his exasperated masters had sought to squeeze into his
intellectuals had simply gone in his ears and run out of his eyes. Little now
seemed left behind of his learning but some vague reckoning of the tribes into
which habilists divided all beasts, a modicum of Tutin – the language of
scholarship and the Empire – and page upon page of unauthorised drawings. It
had felt like a false start as he left the athy and made for the great and
shining prospects of Brandenbrass and after missteps and blank leads, it still
felt like it now.
For, no matter
how he tried these two years gone since departing Athingdon Athenaeum, he had
failed to gain any momentum as a full-fledge fabulist: drafting, etching and
daubing his way from one client to the next upon the headway of an
ever-increasing set of references of ever-increaing excellence. Though he had
been considered many many times, he had only been on three true hunts. He had
thrilled at the chase and stood astonished at the wonder and dread of the
snarling cornered beasts they sought, capturing the wild things with far
greater passion than he drew the exploits of his actual human patron. Unfortunately,
upon the last hunt – now nigh on a year gone –in his eagerness to fully render
the small, wizzened, almost pathetically child-like bogle they were chasing, he
thoughtlessly got in the teratologist’s way thus allowing the little creature
to win free and escape. Though they searched for a week it was never to be
found again. Foiled, the hunt had returned to the city empty-handed where – deprived
of his prize – the teratologist gave Economous so bad a report that it swiftly
spread into an awkward reputation. This poor name went well ahead of the
would-be fabulist, so bringing him to this present paucity of work. Still,
Economous was not about to let himself be so simply prevented. Ever since his
earliest years his way had not been as every other soul’s, and regardless of
anyone else's interventions, he was not about to let one mistake ruin his own chosen
course of life.
