magistrate

Sometimes I get things that don't belong to me.

Or maybe I should rephrase that: sometimes things come to me that have no belonging with me. It happens fairly frequently with the art I do. Sometimes with other physical objects. Sometimes with works by other people – poems or books or whathaveyou. But something will come to me, and it won't let me alone, but it won't be mine. In these cases, I'm slowly learning that my job is to wait for the lurch of SEND THIS OFF NOW or make an educated guess at where that needs to be.

Once, frex, I was idly sketching, and a dragon came out. Not the one I'd been intending to draw, but when I erased him and started over, he came out again. And again. And then I was going to send him off to a friend who worked with that sort of dragon, but I got a sense of no, not now from it, and when I made to ignore those, a series of unlikely coincidences (including forgetting the flash drive I carried with me daily) conspired to prevent me from sending it off. So he sat on my hard drive and I'd poke him occasionally and give up again until one day, out of nowhere, I got this Send this off NOW spike which wouldn't let me leave the room. So I sent him off, where he was received, so I'm told, at exactly the right, critical time.

Or there was the time after I made skullbaby that I decided to make another mask, and started in on an Anubis one. Which then fizzled out and wouldn't let me finish it, and then I started hanging out with someone who worked with Anubis as an aspect. That mask now has a home, and is semi-finished, at least, and has already been used in a production.

It's things like this.

And my sense for these things isn't perfect; that's the cost of guessing, I suppose. But there have been enough hits (and only one real catastrophe) that I keep going with it, because if I don't, I end up feeling like a cad for weeks afterward.

Speaking of which, is there anyone who feels, metaphysically, like they're missing an epic Bengali lyrical love poem from me?