#cranesong

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Everyone boo at Spencer for making a stupid spider man meme joke that took him unnecessarily long to draw

unfortunately, the most drawing i've done lately has been doodling headshots of some old characters my friends and I enjoyed throwing at each other and putting in situations.

coyoterush and badgerstar are designed by @mickadamz, coyote has some minor edits from me but nothing major

The final story in Cranesong is a romantic story, but I don’t mean romance like wildflowers and silver coins. When I was fifteen, I was promised all these love stories -- airport chases, jazz dances, summer downpours -- but all I truly held was confusion, scraped elbows and knees, last month’s issue of Seventeen. 

In high school, Topaz Winters reached out to me to submit to her new publication -- a lovely music-themed place called Half Mystic Journal (@wearehalfmystic). I wanted to write a story about being fifteen and not quite in love yet. It became a short piece about Natalie and the new girl in her orchestra, called “Dissonant”. 

When I was putting together Cranesong, I got the chance to revisit this story! It was so much fun to see this nostalgic snapshot of who I was and what I valued in high school. Stylistically, I’d grown a lot, so there was much revising to be done.

For example:

When Vera Fletcher joins the youth orchestra at the beginning of tenth grade, Natalie doesn’t know what to think. Vera is beautiful. Her eyes are dark and her skin is bronze like it’s lit from within by candles and her glistening inky curls sweep her collarbone in the shy way that makes boys stare.

(Natalie imagines she smells like strawberries, or maybe mango. Something fruity. But she never gets close enough to know.)

More importantly, Vera is better than Natalie, and this is a problem because Natalie is second chair violin right now and after Rachel Wong graduates this year, she’s going to be concertmaster.

became

Vera was better than Natalie. That was obvious from the beginning. For years, the youth orchestra had been in Rachel Wong’s palms, Rachel with her pre-college programs at goddamn Juilliard and private violin lessons since age four, did you hear she was the youngest student ever selected for concertmaster? But Rachel was graduating two years ahead of Natalie which meant first chair violin was going to be hers. She hated her own entitlement but she couldn’t help feeling that, after years of suffering through Rachel’s performing at Carnegie Hall next month! and Rachel practices for four hours a day, why can’t you be more like her?, she deserved the position.

I wanted to increase the emotional stakes for Natalie -- to make it more obvious to the reader why exactly becoming concertmaster is so important to her, thus making her feelings toward Vera -- her musical rival -- even more complicated. 

I also realized I was all about imagery and physical descriptions in the original version -- dark eyes, bronze skin, inky curls -- but thought the story would be more interesting if I focused on Natalie’s emotional landscape instead.

“Dissonance” might be the most romantic story in Cranesong, but it’s a piece with an awesome best friend, too! Platonic relationships are so underrated.

She is a major Taylor Swift stan:

“You’re always playing pieces by dead white men,” Arianna said one day. “As if they were the only ones who created anything meaningful when, like, Taylor Swift defined an entire fucking generation.”

‘Nuff said.

Fun fact: I am not musical at all -- hi tone-deaf, I’m Dad! 

Wanna read “Dissonance” in its entirety? 

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Bumblestar voice Heyyy i know i just beat up your daughter butttt. Can you help me realize i need estrogen

I was originally gonna do a whole comic about bumble taking to quick (the trans cat she's closest to) butttt i got lazy. Maybe I'll write smth about it. But the storm kittens now got a mama ^_^

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