Meet the beetles

Where work isn’t always "work."

Sacha and I are well past the halfway point of this trip to France and I realize now that I might have been a bit ambitious in my plans for making things here, while also doing things. As we planned and packed for this five-week stay in Provence, I imagined that I’d get up each morning and put in some solid work on sketches and a layout with the goal being a book dummy for the two insect stories I’ve been writing. I also planned to write an entire third bug story. I also planned to have time to just draw stuff. Like, sit in cafés and observe and sketch. Oh, and don’t forget the detailed travel journal I expected to keep, complete with writing and lovely edited photographs. And did I mention I brought my bike? I expected to be out riding most mornings, up and down the lovely paths, also stopping to sketch and write and photograph along the way. And that’s just the mornings. Lunchtimes and afternoons would be filled with doing stuff: visiting villages and markets, hanging out with some friends and family who were visiting, preparing amazing dinners. Yes, I was ambitious.

I’m crazy. No idea what I was thinking.

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Honestly though, I realized my folly pretty early into the trip and quickly recalibrated my expectations. I have actually done a little bit of everything I just mentioned. I’ve put in some solid time on the bike. I’ve taken a lot of pictures. We had friends and family drop in and we showed them around and visited unbelievably pretty villages and lakes. I kept a written diary and except for the crummy internet here, we’d have had a really good one online as well. We went to Nîce for a weekend! And, importantly for this newsletter, I’ve sketched, and written about, insects.

The morning after I drew the olive trees from the last edition of Random Orbit, which was also the morning before our first guests arrived and things got busy, I was able to sit down for several hours and write what I think is a solid outline for this third bug story. More than just an outline, actually. I got down some dialog and some phrasing and descriptive stuff that I’m really happy with¹. Not even a messy first-draft, an outline like this usually ends up looking nice and neat, but if successful, raises more questions than it answers. I knew the general plot of this third bug story, I thought of it one day back in Philly while driving. And some of the main themes will reflect the same ideas in the first two stories.² What I wanted to find out was whether the plot made sense. I outlined the various situations, and then elaborated on each, more or less forming possible chapters.

After several happy hours of this, I closed the laptop with satisfaction. I knew I was at a good stopping point, and knowing at that point that this trip wasn’t going to engender the sort of writing I’d orginally planned, I felt it was where I needed it to be, at least. You’ve probably been where I’m describing, where you know your idea was a good one, you’re really on to something, but you don’t have the time or whatever you need to actually write it, and it’s all you can do not to relay the whole story, as thin and pointless as it is, to whoever is sitting nearest you, because you know it’s soooo good.³

I wish I could tell you all about it.⁴

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In the end, the issues related to being on this trip to France sort of work out perfectly. First, this place is inspiring. I’m watching dragonflies and bats and chaffinches go about their day and do the things they do. The cicadas have really been noisy this last week as the heat rises. Just now, we watched the cat that has kind of adopted us toy with a lizard for a half hour. The animal world is different and more present here than it is in Philly, and I’m writing it all down.

The bandwidth required to organize this outline and lay out a loose plot is different, too. It’s less than that required to really write. This newsletter has been documenting my trying to be a better writer, and one of the things I’ve learned about writing is that there are some real analogs to my experience illustrating. Like, I can be here in France, in my espadrilles, with a drink, and sketch olive trees for hours and hours. But I wouldn’t expect to be able to pull off a proper illustration, I don’t think.⁵ Likewise, there’s writing and then there’s writing. Outlining, notes, phrases, this I can do. But organizing an outline is very different from actually getting into the story, from digging-in and writing. And I saw that this kind of work was just out of the question.

One of the questions that this outline asked was who exactly is my main character, this beetle musician? When I wrote the first of these stories, about a Stinkbug, a lot of time went by between writing the first messy draft and the actual story. In that time, I drew about one million stinkbugs. And in that time, the stinkbugs I drew changed and evolved. When I got back to writing the stinkbug story this last spring, these new-look stinkbugs affected the writing.

Mainly, they gave me sort of this character to write to. The stinkbug sketches had personality, and this carried over to the writing. Suddenly situations between the stinkbug and various animals our hero meets on his journey were clarified, dialogue came easier, mannerisms and traits made sense.⁶

With this process in mind, and with the limitations naturally imposed by this stay in France, I’ve been drawing a lot of beetles.

Drawing animals as main characters is somewhat new to me. I drew something like 70 children’s books before I drew one with animals as characters. If I’m drawing a picture book about a construction worker, and that construction worker is a human, that’s easy. If that construction worker is a pig, let’s say, or a dog,⁷ I now have to figure out whether pig construction workers wear boots or not, or gloves or not. Do the dogs have holes in the pants for their tails? Neither animal has opposable thumbs, how do I have them hold things? (In the case of the pigs, things just sort of touch their hooves. For the dogs, I gave them gloves. With fingers.) In the case of this beetle story, our hero is a musician. How does a beetle look playing a clarinet? Or a violin?

Or, good lord, an accordion? Beetles have six legs, which means I have two extra arms to play with. How can I use them? Many beetles have those wild-looking mandibles. How does a beetle play a trumpet with those things? Does my beetle wear a hat? Is he cocky and sly, or sort of shy and befuddled? What do I do with the hard carapace of the beetle? Can I use the wings? If I give myself the job to draw this beetle several dozen times for a story, what will make him interesting, and how will that make the story more fun to write?

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this. Insects are basically aliens, and trying to make them do human things like hold a trumpet or a cup of tea is difficult and kind of weird. But at times, something jumps at me. Some little detail works, or a beetle neck-part decides to be a scarf or a collar, lending a little je ne sais quois to my beetle musician character. And I get excited.

I will be returning to Philadelphia⁸ with neither a finished book dummy nor a finished manuscript. But that’s okay. Because I did just enough on both that I opened that little imagination doorway, where I’m thinking about it while I’m cooking dinner and working on it while I’m out riding a bike and making notes and often this is where the good stuff happens. When I get back in the studio mid-July, I’ll have the raw-materials in place to close the door and get shit done.

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Three big reasons I really got into riding bikes:

• The stories at The Radavist

• Abram Landes's photos from bike events.

• Lu Lacka Wyco Hundo, a 100-mile bike event in northeast PA each spring.

All three of these sort of came together on Friday. A piece I wrote about LLWH that features Abe's photos was published at The Radavist. Really excited about this.

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I’m at the bandwidth limit for this Substack post, but I’ll leave one more sketch here. This is the view as we walk down the road into the town of Aups. I’ve drawn this like four times, and each time I get closer to what I want. More Provence sketches on a later newsletter.

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1. Sometimes one little sentence makes a character. You write it, and you think, yes, that’s my dude. I’ll probably write an entire newsletter about this particular sentence one day.

2. Generally, these characters are learning to be independent and resourceful. And at times, they’ve sort of had it with society, with other people. But not people, other animals. And it’s, you know, for kids.

3. Well, at least you hope it is, and really, you just want someone to tell you that they think so too.

4. Sort of footnoting that last footnote, I think that telling people storylines like this is actually helpful. It’s like an elevator pitch. The story might make sense in your head, but when you’re actually telling it, does it still make sense? Furthermore, when I’ve done this in the past, it’s also when I feel like a storyteller, improvising, making things up. I miss telling bedtime stories to my kids, where I’d just tell about these two yellow birds and their day to my kid. Thank god for Sacha who actually sometimes asks me to tell her how it’s going and actually listens to the thing I’m just making up in my head. I hope you all have a Sacha.

5. Though existence of the iPad sure makes it close, and if a job came in while I’m here, I’d probably be able to do it.

6. The grasshopper story was sort of the opposite. This story was so much fun to write, and came together so quickly, the character was defined in my imagination by the words, and my drawings of Mr Grasshopper followed that lead.

7. Pigs Dig a Road by Carrie Finison, coming in September; and Hard Hat Hank by Charlotte Gunnufson, coming in February! More to come!

8. July 10, in about a week.