So, although it ended up being a little muggy this afternoon, a storm appears to be rolling in. Outside, walking into the wind, I caught the smell of something dead and rotting, faintly sweet and very foetid. I couldn’t find what made the smell at all, although I looked around for it.

A mysterious smell of rot.

There were high fences all around which might have concealed the source of the smell — a dead cat or rodent perhaps — and I might have discovered it if I had methodically pressed my face to the cracks in each of the fences. I looked in one yard, and then another, but I saw no dead things. Perhaps it will have to remain a mystery unsolved.

Anyway, today I’m posting the first text chapter of Lovesong, entitled Whistle in the Dark: The Stars Fall. This chapter is nearly finished, but not quite. I still have three more sections to write before it’s done, but since this blog is an attempt to track my progress as I work, there will probably be plenty of things posted in the future that are not quite finished.

The rain has started. Here it is then, Canto I – Whistle in the Dark: The Stars Fall. This comes immediately after the prologue. Please enjoy the introduction of Oswald Blake.

For some months I have been pressing a half-finished, messy, and deranged set of ramblings on people and claiming it’s the prologue of Lovesong. I have not yet drawn the prologue, as I should, but it’s eleven pages, and that’s pretty intimidating. Not much of Lovesong is actually in sequential art format, just the prologue and then a few other interior pages, more or less meant as additional illustrations of dramatic points, unlike the prologue which is meant to stand entirely on its own.

But the prologue is meant to be sequential art. I cannot imagine it in any other way.

At last I present it to you, organized and paginated, in a way I hope is reasonably easy for you to follow. Ultimately, it needs to be drawn, but until it is, please make use of this, the formal script of the prologue of a Lovesong of Rooks.