Hey

If all my readers recruit just 3 new readers every week, in less than a year I will have more readers than there are people in the world.

The group accepted me as part of the scene. They looked almost like giant seaweed: varying shades of green, blue, and brown, completely limp. They rode the waves three-quarters submerged. There were five in the group, spread out over an area about the size of two football fields. They took the waves head on or aslant, their flaccid bodies exactly following the crests and trenches. One, a bottle-green and rust with deep brown brindling, kept her side to the wind by using her wings as sculls. The rising waves would occasionally lift her wing from the water and drop it back with a soft smack. That was the only sound. They allowed me to drift among them. In the group was a dragon I recognized, the small green with the branching horns who had dived away from us the month before while we were off Cape Howe. I had guessed then that she was a new arrival. I lay on my stomach a long time that morning, holding the tiller with my feet and legs- eye-to-eye with enough dragons to satisfy even my curiosity for the moment. As the sun got well up, they sank lower and lower beneath the surface until I lost sight of them.

Read a fascinating book called Dragons: An Introduction to the Modern Infestation by Pamela Wharton Blanpied that frames itself as a scholarly journal from an alternate Earth where dragons emerged as an invasive megafauna at the turn of the 20th century. The presentation is intentionally dry to emulate a scientific paper (eschewing most of the traditional hallmarks of fantasy to give the book more of a hard sci-fi feel) but it works so well to make things seem real picture she paints of this species is so beautiful.

LOUIE'S PICKS VOL. 1 - vinyl/cd/cassette/guitar picks now available on needlejuice records!! a compilation album of some of my favorite tunes from over the years, one side of vocal tunes and one of instrumentals

Finally finished painting some more cryptid fish plaques! Got lots of coelacanths and more fur-bearing trout, including some more extra fancy rainbow color morphs.