All I’m asking for is a small countryside manor with a giant library and intricately carved wooden accents everywhere that I can put gorgeous wallpaper and art in. And maybe a big clawfoot tub.
When I was 12 years old, my violin teacher owned this peculiar music shop, and I would go there weekly for lessons. It was a narrow old pioneer house whose ground floor had been converted into a storefront and lesson rooms. After a while, a luthier had also moved in upstairs and set up a studio for making violins.
So, one day I’m going into the shop for my lesson. I head in the front door, and before I turn into the living room area where the main shop is, I look down the dark hallway at the rickety wooden stairs that lead up to the luthier’s studio. The air smells like sawdust and lacquer. Just a little bit of light filtering in from the window behind me.
Something’s on the stairway. A huge black animal is making its way down these steep, narrow stairs. I’ve never seen anything like this, I genuinely did not know an animal like this exists, and it comes right up to me, click-click-clicking slowly over the floor, long and tall and dark. There are wood shavings peppering its coat. It lifts its head up and its massive beast-face is virtually level with my child-face and I realize this is a gotdamb bizarro dog of some kind. It looks impossible but it’s real and it’s there, staring at me in total silence with a face the length of my arm. Then it does a 3-point-turn in the tiny dusty hallway and goes right back upstairs.
Turns out this was just the luthier’s dog Seamus, a black borzoi of incredible height and length. anyway i’m just trying to say it was a disturbing set of circumstances under which i discovered what a borzoi is and everything in my life has felt very complicated since then
I think the mentality of “why bother doing something if you’re not good at it?” feeds directly into “if you’re good at it why aren’t you monetizing it?”. At its core I really think its about commodifying every last shred of labor and experience.
THIS
Adding that this is literally a huge reason we don’t leave unsolicited criticism on things like fanworks- fanfiction, fanart, fan crafts etc. Because there’s a LOT of people out there who are just doing this for the fun of it. They’re doing it for the same reason people go on walks- to feel good. And receiving crit they didn’t ask for doesn’t feel good.
Lol literally about to have this talk with my students today as I lead an art lesson and share my Really Shitty Art
Sweet reader, even as you brush aside these gloomy words, you discover a soot-dimmed tapestry, and in it an image of yourself, approaching a ruined mansion.
In the attic bedroom, the girl makes her plans. Meanwhile, an ancient tree rails against injustice on the cobweb-frosted glass of the patterned windows in the long gallery.
So can I use that second sentence in a story, or….?
Writer of lovely & strange fantasy stories, with publications in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Deadlands, Fireside, & others.
Tweeting about writing @JordanRTaylor13
Author Website @ jordantaylorwrites.com
