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creazionesitisite · 6 years

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Sullivan County Commission to talk TIF on Monday, Kingsport’s new park could be sticking point

The commission, meeting in regular session at 9 a.m. Monday, is expected to consider tax increment financing for two new apartment complexes: River Bend, behind Walmart on Fort Henry Drive; and The Overook at Indian Trail, behind Kmart on East Stone Drive.

The Kingsport Board of Mayor and Aldermen OK’d the city’s participation in the two TIF agreements last week.

But for the two deals to move forward and be a “go,” a majority of the 24-member county commission must do likewise.

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The commission discussed both proposals at a monthly work session this past Thursday.

It was clear several commissioners are not convinced the proposals, as drafted, are the best choice for the county. At least one suggested the county needs school resource officers for more of its schools more than it needs the use of a city park that is going to use more than $800,000 worth of TIF money.

At one point in the discussion, Commissioner Eddie Williams, longtime chairman of the commission’s budget committee, said he is agreed with most of the comments in support of the TIF concept for the two projects — but he wasn’t sure deferring the issue a bit to try and get the county a better deal isn’t the best option at this point.

Williams said he’d gotten more telephone calls and questions about this issue than he’d received about any other in a long time.

Williams questioned whether the two developers are being treated equally, and was among those who questioned why the city of Kingsport will gain a city park financed by a portion of the TIF proceeds.

That riverfront park will be developed adjacent to the River Bend apartments behind Walmart — on land the developer swapped to the city, in part in exchange for the city building a road to provide access to the proposed apartment site.

City officials have said county residents will be free to visit and use the park.

Several commissioners said they could think of more urgent uses for the county taxpayers’ diverted money.

Under TIF, law allows a local government to dedicate a portion of expected growth in property tax revenue — projected to occur because the proposed development increases a property’s tax appraisal and assessment — to be used to pay for a portion of the development costs.

It typically has been used to pay for infrastructure and other improvements to help a developer recoup the cost of preparing a blighted area for new development.

The property owners do pay the total new tax bill, but the county agrees to divert a portion of the new tax revenue — for a set number of years — to payoff the agreed amount of development costs.

When retail projects are granted TIF funding, supporters often cite the expected economic impact from added jobs or growth in sales tax collections.

In these two cases, supporters have said the new residential units will create a direct and indirect economic impact, the latter attributable to money the apartment dwellers will spend at nearby businesses.

The doubters at the commission’s discussion on Thursday asked if these renters wouldn’t just be moving from old apartments elsewhere in the city — so their spending would not be “new” to the local economy.

Commissioner Joe Herron, one sponsor of the TIF proposals, said the new apartments are intended to house hundreds of newcomers to the city.

Herron said a main driver behind the need for the new complexes, which he described as “upscale,” is the recruitment of several hundred new employees by Eastman Chemical Company, as part of the company’s $1.6 billion “Project Inspire” — a seven-year expansion and modernization plan which includes construction of a new five-story $74.3 million corporate business center off Wilcox Drive near Lincoln Street.

Herron said these new apartments fill a need for this level of housing, which is desired based on results of a survey.

Herron said without these new apartments, those new Eastman employees will have to live in Johnson City in order to find similar housing options.

Developers have told the Kingsport Housing and Redevelopment Authority neither apartment project is viable without the incentives which would come through TIF.

Use of TIF had until this year been used in Sullivan County only for commercial development in redevelopment districts.

That changed when Sullivan County and Bristol Tennessee city officials agreed for TIF for an apartment complex in Bristol earlier this year.

Some county commissioners predicted then that the door was being opened to similar projects seeking TIF in Kingsport.

Sullivan County and the city of Bristol Tennessee earlier this year approved $1 million in TIF for the “upscale” apartment complex in Bristol.

Mitch Cox, of Johnson City, was the developer there.

Cox is now seeking TIF his proposed “River Bend” development.

And K.D. Moore, of Bristol, is seeking TIF for “Overlook at Indian Trail.”

Neither development includes government-assisted or “Section 8” housing.

The KHRA is involved because of the role it plays in redevelopment, not housing.

The Sullivan County Commission is scheduled to meet in regular session at 9 a.m. Monday on the second floor of the Sullivan County Courthouse.

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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This is archival. You can find my current work @tryskits

#discovers the dark mode theme in dA after queuing 200 posts #my eyes hurt so bad y'all #like i liked having The Traditional dA Look on these screenshots but i had an eye exam today and my eyes HUUUUURT #so dark mode from now #i said ‟today‟ as if y'all won't see this like 2-3 months after i queued it lol #deviantArt archive #art archive #TrysKits work #illustration #oc art #old art #original character #Khra-nicles #ithke #mild nudity #00s #2006 #Age 15

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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March 2007 Extras

I've only found two extra for March '07, but they're on very opposite ends of the spectrum.

This was definitely a gift for a dA friend, and I have a vague recollection that it might have been that he was having a rough time so i was trying to cheer him up? The thing I can't figure is why it's not still in my dA gallery. I can't imagine I didn't post it (it's DONE-done, you know? It even looks pretty good!!), so I must've taken it down at some point... and to delete a gift, especially one that looks pretty good, is completely inexplicable. Really weird.

Ruaidri, if you're still out there somewhere, this is Rhawen/Refkins. I hope I did get this to you and you saved it or something??? If not and it's something you still want, here it is, over a decade later! Hope you're doing alright out there, dude.

This one I found as an unfinished PSD. It's concept art for one of the stories set in Khra, specifically the one featuring Kriamiss, Craie, and Leaf as the central characters. This is to do with the main villain, Maroc Baylinthe, and the governmental organization he overtook, The Rangers, which Arren Minetelle--seen in other works and the protagonist of another of the Khra stories--also belongs to.

Anyhow, these are archival works from when I was a teen. You can find my current work @tryskits

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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March 2012: Dead Ten Years (Draft 1)

This is both a nonfiction personal essay about me, my creative process, and my stepping away from art in 2009, and a Khra-nicles prequel/side story about Unge. It was done for a fiction class, but I'd already established a habit of telling true stories about me while pretending they were fiction.

I'll talk about this a little more in one of the upcoming posts, but in March 2012 I briefly returned to dA and tried to resume drawing and creating as I had done when I was a teen. It would not last.

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I have always sat down for tea with my characters, sipping away in the café of my mind where we chat about their lives and their futures and their thoughts and their dreams. Before I decided I was too terrible an artist to wield a pencil, I entered these teatime meetings by drawing my characters endlessly: profile, three-quarters view, face-forward stare, hands and arms and legs and feet and limbs, limbs, limbs, and a raging expression here or a joyous one there or an image of melancholy or remorse or fear or shock or thrill, and then the most important scenes from each of their lives until finally I went back and did the whole thing over again, pages of history notes sacrificed to the characters’ forms, their lines obfuscating the words.

For a time, starting around 2009, I ceased drawing any of them at all, convinced that the only worthy endeavor was to create new characters, explore new realms, run away from the world I’d been building since 2005 and the pantheon of characters Mare and I had birthed in the primordial soup of our friendship, all to attain a kind of writing I didn’t particularly enjoy. Somehow, every character following that so thoroughly drawn tribe fell flat, pancakes on a cold griddle. Proportionally, my sense of frustration grew, and I slowly became convinced I wasn’t good for much but long strings of actions, play-by-plays of capture the flag, and roaming introspections that blended Eastern and Western in a way that my peers did not like.

And then, in a fit of desperation, unable to conceive of a single new plot or personality, I wrote about Arren, andI felt reborn. It seemed to me then that my mistake all along had been to deny the characters I’d had tea with everyday of my life for four years. Quietly, I began to draw.

Unge S. Chickt stood at her window overlooking the city of P’tak from its opulent heart. Xev had been dead for ten years.

It was 0 A.K., the age-turning year following the death of the Demon Kifer, and Unge could hardly get used to the ideaJust the fact that the Demon was dead was nigh-impossible to adjust to after his reign of terror—thousands of years of civilization burning under his sanguine gaze ending all at once, demarcated by a change in calendar. Only the Elementals who were as old as Khra itself remembered a time before the Demon.

It had also been a year since Unge had met the hero who had slain Kifer: Arren Minetelle, a petite Fox Raeth with ice blue eyes wrapped in the blood crimson of a Ranger’s cloak. At the time, the girl had pep, a raging fire in her spirit that did not compromise, and a conviction that hers was the right path, the just one. She appeared, determined to slay Kifer, armed with knowledge from Rhawen, and prepared to risk it all. Unge sent her to Nassab in search of an artifact the girl had called the Demon’s Eye and did not see her again until the Battle at the Elemental Fields. There, Unge had joined her forces—IMDP—with the Elementals’ and the Rangers’ in order to defeat Kifer and his army. Arren appeared amidst the fray, her left eye gone, replaced with a desiccated, angry orb. Unge had naught to do but watch as the girl grappled with Kifer, tearing out the massive, glowing red stone that occupied his left socket. The Demon had screamed, his voice reaching an unearthly pitch of terror, and from Arren’s eye the desiccated thing leapt out with an angry hiss, falling into Kifer’s now empty socket. All at once, the Demon exploded into dust.

After the battle, Arren was nowhere to be found, and the Ranger’s Head was dead. Though Raeth celebrated Kifer’s death—such celebration Unge had never before seen—terror seized the Rangers’ ranks, chickens without heads. And then Arren returned, slogging out of the northern forests and stumbling westward to the Rangers’ Headquarters. The Rangers, the country’s populace, even the Elementals, demanded that she be the new Head, this woman who had killed the world’s great evil. Yet she stood before them, her left socket still a ragged hole, the edges of the bone cracked, the skin scarring, and she said no.

Garron Baylinthe became the Head, and Unge should have been happy about that. The man was a native of P’tak, born and bred in the city’s love for technology, though woefully filled with its distrust of magic, too. Still, this should have been fortuitous for Unge, placing her and her city in a less precarious position with the rest of the nation. All the same, the moment filled her with an odd foreboding, and before long she found herself contacting Arren, asking one thing: Watch the Rangers. Become a double agent.

Miraculously, the hero had agreed.

In some sense, I suppose, you could almost frame my understanding of my characters as a psychosis. As I was, by and large, depressed and suicidal between the ages of ten and nineteen, I developed a habit of consulting my characters. I would sit in the shower—I would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time—and, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself for no good reason, I would conjure up an image of Kriamiss or Pain, and I would imagine them embracing me, lending me their strength through simple contact.

This evolved, as such things do, such that, in the middle of high school, I would walk through the halls feeling them behind me—imaginary friends though it only occurs to me now to name it so—and it would be a simple matter to draw strength from them in that way. And, again, the whole affair evolved, as the fact of being single began to chafe, such that the characters became ideals, promising that, oh, if only they were real, they’d certainly love me because clearly no one else would.

There’s something shameful in that memory, an embarrassment lurking around the roots of the heart, and yet when I think how, after I’d abandoned them all, I brushed closer to death than I ever had before, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the trade-off was fair.

Unge had never trusted the Rangers. They were, to her mind, a dangerous lot. Their Head was also Raeth’s Head, and while he was elected by the Raethian populace at large, Unge couldn’t help but wonder if the system could be rigged. Even when she was younger, breasts barely formed and yet already yearning for a greater purpose, the fact that the Rangers were Raeth’s only police force, its only military filled her with dread, fear, and something acid like bile. Where was the safety on that gun? Suppose, just suppose, that the Rangers ever went astray? Just suppose that they lost sight of their purpose, lost sight of their limits, lost sight of Raeth’s needs. What then? Who would be there to stop them? The Elementals didn’t bother themselves about Raethian business. The Mages were a scattered group of farmers’ helpers and wandering midwives. There was no one else.

For a long time, Unge struggled with that thought. Even when she set out from Nitemaer, determined to see the country in full, that sense of Ranger Danger followed her, with no feasible solution in tow. None, until Xev.

Twenty years ago, Xev said, “You’re right about this Ranger thing. We gotta do something ‘bout it.” Xev was from N’zik, a small city surrounded by desert to one side and jungle to the other, previously the capital of an ancient Dragonfolk civilization, and now just one of the four Raethian settlements that could be properly called cities, one for each point of the compass. Unge was not terribly impressed with the southern city, though the use of sandstone was lovely.

“I know, but what’s there to do?” Unge was perhaps twenty at the time, a traveler for only two years who’d nonetheless done away with the decadent fabrics and elaborate constructions of Nitemaer’s garb in favor of the simple leather and cotton to be found in most Raethian villages. “I’ve been thinking about this for years, and still I don’t know.”

“No ideas?” Xev, a Dog Raeth all of sleek Labrador blacks and dewy brown eyes, melted over the arm of his chair. He seemed impossibly long, arms trailing across the floor, toes delicately brushing the ground, and yet he was still, somehow, in proportion.

“Well.” She paused, turning the thoughts over in her mind. “If you’ve got one organization in charge of everything, that’s a problem. But what if you had two?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Two?”

“Say you’ve got the Rangers, just as they are, but then you make, like, a second Rangers— ‘cept call them something else obviously—“

“Obviously.”

“—Well then you task the second group with not only defending the peace and all that stuff, but also with keeping an eye on the Rangers. Then you go to the Rangers and say, ‘Hey, keep an eye on the new guys.’ So now you’d have double the police force and both would be making sure the other one didn’t slip up and go evil on us all.”

Xev smiled and reached out to touch Unge’s tawny hair. “Well why not do that then?”

Unge blinked, and one of her canine ears twitched. “Well, I mean, that’s not something I can do.”

Xev merely shook his head and offered her his hand.

Within a year the foundations of IMDP had been laid, and the year after that, they began recruiting. Five years after that conversation, IMDP was complete with secret agents, a business front to hide behind, and the cooperation of P’tak’s local government. The time had not seemed prudent to reveal themselves to the Rangers—much more effective to merely spy on them for now, until IMDP was of equal strength at least—and so the organization remained in shadow, its business front slowly elevating it until its letters stood atop a skyscraper right at the heart of P’tak, among the richest of the rich.

And then Xev died.

Here is something else about the characters and me. Nearly all of them are some part of myself, magnified over and over until perhaps you couldn’t tell they were ever me at all. Yet the fact remains that they are magnifications, and if you really, truly wanted, you could trace back their lineage. Kriamiss was a wish fulfillment fantasy on steroids, and forever and again, in the present, it is always a struggle to determine how to reduce an angsty enchanter-healer-angel-thing back into a person without upsetting the tender chronology of his entire story arc, of which Unge S. Chickt is but a small part. And so you have to look again and see what else they stole from you. By which I mean, from me. For Kriamiss it is the angst. Specifically, the angst that flies in the face of all the talent, all the ability, all the good fortune, and all the love that has ever and will ever be showered upon his foolish, morose head. His is a suburban ennui in a place that has no suburbs—though obviously I have suburbs, roiling in my blood the way a tar pit might bubble. Arren Minetelle, great savior of not only Raeth but all of Khra—the world’s hero, defeating its personification of evil—has what in common with a girl from [town], Massachusetts who can barely handle a stubbed toe, never mind ripping her own eye out— twice? For that you should look to Arren’s motives. Here is a woman whose cause is so just and so righteous that surely she must be the hero, surely she has saved us all, and yet she hunts down Kifer not because it is the right thing to do—so many had tried and failed over the thousands of years of his life—but because he killed the man she loved, a Ranger called Rusek who believed in due process. Arren enters in on a quest for revenge first—an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind—and on a quest for justice second, and therefore Arren is a cross-section of should and is, and if I don’t have that in common with her, then I don’t know myself.

But perhaps you don’t know these people, though now you must know Unge, and I’ve mentioned Xev, but as he is borne of M[...]’s consciousness, not my own, I cannot tell you about him. I can tell you about Unge, but I think you will find it anticlimactic.

Unge is among the oldest of the bunch. I drew her before anime styling crept, poorly, into my artist’s hand. I drew her before there was a Khra or a Kriamiss or an Arren, at a time when M[...] and I were only just acquaintances who shared a school bus. Unge came out of Neopets.com, out of a time when anthropomorphic animals were new and exciting to me so that I took to drawing gelerts—strange, dog-like things—in skirts with big, lavender eyes—a terrible sight to behold. When I “adopted” a gelert someone had named Ungeschickt, the name disappointed me. I therefore had to make Ungeschickt – quickly shortened to Unge for all intents, dues, and purposes – into the most badass of motherfuckers. And so, the first picture of Unge, ever, presented her as a femme fatale in a pink miniskirt and pearls, thoughtfully gesturing with her bloodied dagger. In this way, Unge was born of my love of 007, only to transmogrify, upon her entry into Khra, into a desire for a better world.

A knock, followed by Tarrin Carithelle, Rien Carithelle, and Arren Minetelle, all but Rien looking stoic. Unge turned, forty years of espionage squeezed into a business suit, forty years of aggressive gaiety etched into her face. “Hello, my darlings.”

Tarrin and Arren sketched stiff salutes, each in their own style, and Tarrin pretended that she was not awed by Raeth’s Very Own Hero. Rien beamed, unfazed by the world’s goings ons, mind still tangling with gears and levers and electricity.

“What did Rhawen say?” Unge asked, settling into the plush chair behind her desk and gesturing for the trio to settle themselves where they saw fit.

Tarrin snorted, mouth opening to snarl about the peculiar woman, but Rien cut her off. “She doesn’t want to see anyone besides Arren right now.” The tiny girl adjusted her glasses. “Though she did like the things we brought her. Especially the mechanical pencils. Completely taken with them.”

Unge rolled a pen on her desk. “But we don’t get to know where to find her?”

“No,” Arren said, a stone slab dropping. Her youth frightened Unge, sometimes. The ghastly eye socket, the runs in her face, deep-set, that made her look like marble, the ice blue of her remaining eye—just ice now—her hand never straying far from her sword’s pommel (a sword only allowed by P’tak’s strict ban on selling guns outside the city and the centuries-long lack of trade between Raeth and Nassab, though that wouldn’t last much longer if Unge had anything to do with it).

“No?” The pen rolled off of Unge’s desk.

Tarrin grumbled but held her tongue.

“Rhawen is not in a position to be as helpful as she’d like, and to that end it is better for her if as few people know her location as possible.” Arren allowed herself a sigh and continued, “I had thought that enabling you to go to her directly might not be asking too much, but Rhawen is adamant on this point. She is…”

“Yes, what is she?” Unge snapped, frustration surprising both her and the three women before her.

“Unge?” Rien squeaked. Unge shook her head.

One of the lines in Arren’s brow softened. “Rhawen is something of the world. Old. She has her reasons.”

“Well I’d feel a lot fuckin’ better about it if she’d just give us straight goddamn answers,” Tarrin growled.

The brow line reasserted itself. “Perhaps you should just get better at riddles then,” Arren said.

Unge pondered for a moment. She’d been working with Rhawen before Arren had killed Kifer, but the woman had never opened up to Unge the way she had to Arren, and even that was a chilly connection.

A wave of fatigue washed over her, and she missed Xev.

“Well thank you for trying, my lovelies,” Unge said, feeling herself sink onto her desk. “I suppose we’ll just do things the way we always have. We’ll wait.” Xev wouldn’t have tolerated this waiting. He’d have been tracking right up to Rhawen’s house and demanding answers, all with a pleasant smile.

One of the oddities of the internet is that every individual’s idea of it is discrete, separate from every other individual’s idea of it. My internet is different from yours is different from Steve’s is different from your little cousin’s even though we all can and do talk about the internet as if it were one thing—one place—when, in fact, it is a thousand tiny microcosms. My internet was a place for outsiders to hide and feel less alone. I spent time on Neopets, constructing, building, proposing characters and web pages and drawings and later yammering on to deviantArt and then role playing with M[...] on AIM—all day, every day, talking around the character’s conversations as if we were at some sort of party—and on and on and on, until between M[...] and I, we had produced an entire world filled with faces I knew and loved in a way I could not know or love the people around me because reality would never be anything but disappointing. (And so there it is.)

But what is odd is that when we left that world, all the other fictions out there were never enough for me either. So it was disappointing reality, disappointing fiction, and then before you know it, you’re what feels like a lifetime away from those socially reclusive days, and you find yourself starting to submerge yourself in all those old habits right back over again. And what’s more, M[...] is too, though the methods are slightly different. Why, after abandoning deviantArt four years ago, have we returned to it, just as she graduates from [college]? Why, four years after I set aside Khra, the KriamBook, the Pupcat Riley Story, the Asher Concept, and Arren’s Tale, have I found myself inexorably drawn towards them, fed up and disgusted with everything else that droops out of my pen, just when I’m meant to be serious about my work, my career, my life, and the future? What has caused us to come full circle, and why am I the only one of us twain questioning it?

Xev died on a mission of first contact.

Unge harbored two great dreams. The first: fix the Raethian judicial and political system to better prevent corruption. The second: re-establish diplomatic ties with Nassab and undo the political damage caused by the Great War, a thousand or so years ago. The trouble with this latter goal was, first and foremost, that a Human of Nassab would always kill and Raethian on sight, and most Raethians wouldn’t behave a whole lot more nobly. Oh, naturally, illegal trading had always occurred between the two continents—P’tak’s technological wealth was drawn directly from that fact—but Unge desired open trade. Raethian society was ruled by magic—the fact of the Elementals on the continent ensured that—and Nassab, left without easy access to magic, had turned to technology. And Unge wanted both. Nitemaer was one of the few places that mixed them, and that mentality ran deep in Unge.

It was only natural that—observing the black market ships sailing between Bollen on Nassab and P’tak on Raeth—Unge determined that IMDP would certainly engage in some trading of its own and once begun, found their dealings with Bollen went well. Unge then thought to expand. To that end, she sent Xev to northern Nassab, and when he returned, he was merely a head in a box, a note pinned to the outside: “No Dogs.”

Unge shook the cobwebs from her mind. Tarrin and Rien had left, returning to their respective departments. Arren remained, sipping water and looking over Unge’s view of P’tak. Unge, at her side, pointed out through the city’s haze to where the ocean was just barely visible. “One of these days, that’s gonna be all boats all the time.” She smirked. “You won’t be the only Raethian to scoot around Nassab.”

Arren nodded, remaining eye closed. “Rhawen asked a favor of me.”

“Oh?”

From a pouch on her hip, Arren removed a small letter, some tiny object weighing down one of the envelope’s corners. It was sealed with orange wax—an odd choice—the imprint of what looked to be a dragon in flight squashed into the pumpkin color. An extinct animal for an ancient woman who didn’t look a day over twenty-five, apparently knew everything there was to know, and then refused to tell you. Why not dragons?

Unge took it to the desk and broke the seal. Alongside the letter, Rhawen had inserted a pendant matching the seal impressed into the wax—one of those extinct dragons in flight. Unge ran her thumb over it, unsure of its connotation, though remembering that Rhawen wore one such pendant. She glanced at Arren, a question in her eyes, but Arren did not meet her gaze, sipping her glass of water instead.

Unge settled into her chair and read the letter.

Allow me just one more moment of your time, before you read Rhawen’s letter, before you decide if all this time spent poring over a day in Unge’s life and the musings of her author—her technical, real author, not Rhawen, the Narrator, who is the voice who tells these stories—was wasted.

Purpose applies to all of these situations. I don’t know what your life was like in 2001 or 2002, but I know what mine was like, and for all the material fortune in the world, I was nonetheless struck with a deep-seated misery that I couldn’t explain, and really I still can’t, at least not in a way that feels authentic. I was filled with guilt over this feeling—“There are children starving in Africa!”—and yet the feeling persisted until I became jealous of the starving children because at least they knew why they were miserable. It’s no surprise then that the characters I birthed were universally sad, universally restless, and universally struck with tepid misfortunes which, in theory, should be world-shattering, and yet in application remained ineffective. Kriamiss’s mother dies when he is fifteen, and he flees his home, finds the father that abandoned them and that man dies too, and then when he finds someone to love in the world, she kills him, and it isn’t until he’s been dead five hundred years that he has a second chance—to save the world, to become whole. My inability to feel anything at a degree less than acutely became his saga of misfortunes—too many to be useful, narrative-wise, but just enough to try to justify feeling the way I did.

So why feel so acutely? It’s hard to say. Do you blame a chemical imbalance; do you blame a spoiled upbringing; do you blame an inherent, genetic sensitivity, or do you perhaps put it down to some sort of flaw, a lack of the “right stuff”? I’m not sure; it’s all too far away to say anything concrete about. The memory is unreliable, the heart is unreliable, the mind is unreliable, even the evidence of the eyes is unreliable, because all is perception. In the present time, however, let us put it all down to purpose. There was purpose when we created, there was a loss of purpose when we stopped, and now we seek out purpose again—and so the whole world, the whole array of characters, have returned, because they cannot exist without us.

And how about Kriamiss or Unge? Why is it that every character I create is alone, at the end of the day, always by themselves, contained within the space of their own bodies, isolated? I am alone when I am with people; I am alone when I am not. Solitude, then purpose. We—the characters and me—travel alone and look for something to do. Something meaningful. Save the world, that’s always good, or maybe just improving it will do. Always with the epic narrative, always with the complete saga, and always with the search for purpose and the inescapable solitude.

I reiterate: the characters are me.

Unge—

Some twenty years ago, I sat on a café veranda in N’zik, and I watched a young Dog Raeth with tawny hair and a full bosom chitter and laugh with another young Dog Raeth, this one a sea of blacks and browns constructed into a long, lithe, lingering body. They laughed with one another, at one another, at themselves, caught in what I shall call puppy love. I saw, at that time, their histories and their present, and while I have never been known to predict the future, everything I could sense about them suggested that they were bound for greater things. When, ten years ago, one of the two passed from this world on to Ahrk, I knew of this too, and I thought for a long time about how to make things right.

What answer can I give you? Arren sought out her own, and I supported her, and now, even with all the knowledge a mortal can be allowed, I find myself regretting. There lies Kifer, dead, and is not one girl’s youth worth the safety of thousands? But still the regret persists.

I digress.

You have a dream.

The Dragonfolk are waning, but their presence is still felt and revered in the northern climes of Nassab. Southern Nassab is, generally, filled with hatred for their once-oppressors, but in the north the sentiment is less present, the sins more forgiven, and so a Dragonfolk token can go a long way. Therefore, please find enclosed the symbol of the Dragonfolk; may it earn you passage to those places closed off to all but the eldest. I will only ask that you do not use it to go to the Verde Isles.

With these thoughts in mind, I wish you well and tell you now that Xev died wishing for you.

Rhawen E. Fox

Unge choked and found, through her sobs, that Arren stood at her shoulder, merely holding it. The younger woman maintained that spot, one worn hand acknowledging Unge’s pain for the half hour it took the older woman to regain herself, her gaiety washed away by a ten-year-old memory of a dead man.

When Unge had subsided, Arren took herself to the other side of the desk and sat down. She folded her arms on the black, sanitized wood, her posture suddenly more like the girl she should have been. Eyes hard on Unge, she said, “I’ve known tears like that.”

Unge nodded. “Xev was—he made this. All of this. Just by saying it was possible. Just ‘You can do it, Unge.’ This can be done. And then it was. That was all it took. He said I could do it, so I did.” Her breath rattled. “How do you come back from that? How do you answer for that death?”

Arren took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Unge could feel every crease, every callous in the hero’s hand. Here was where her sword had worn itself a home and here at the finger tips the place for her bow. These tiny cuts for every hour of traveling from one Raethian coast to the other and these weathered folds for every night spent alone beneath the stars forming a web to catch demons. Arren’s nails were dirty, but in spite of the usage written across her hands, Unge could see where once the delicate shape of a genteel woman’s glove may have fit, and Unge’s own palm felt suddenly fat and chubby in the grasp of one so conflictingly worked.

Arren withdrew, her whole self drawn back up into the raw eye socket, sucked behind a glacial mask. She stood, saying, “The Rangers will miss me momentarily. Baylinthe’s put his son and Brue Nadir as his top officers. Most of the men are terrified of Brue, which leaves me and the boy to see that morale stays up.”

Unge closed her eyes, nodding her understanding, but found Arren leaning in when she’d opened them again.

“The boy. Maroc Baylinthe. He might be trouble.”

There seemed something more she wanted to say, and Unge prompted her—“How so?”—but Arren shook her head and stepped away. “It may just be me. The men love him.” A tightness around her mouth suggested a deeper trouble, but Arren shook it off. “No, it is nothing. He is a Ranger, after all.” With that, Arren saluted, said her farewells, and whisked out of the room, just a red cloak disappearing behind metal doors.

Unge considered the disappearing cloak and fingered the pendant. She laughed. “Dragonfolk symbols and the great hero feels compassion? Oh dear.” She’d have to have someone look deeper into these Baylinthes. Arren wasn’t the most intuitive of ladies, but Unge wasn’t about to dismiss her discomfit out of hand. The Rangers had completely failed to exhibit corruption, these past ten years. Perhaps now was the time?

Unge left her chair, pendant still in hand, and returned to her favorite spot, staring out over the city—her city—where she contemplated reconciling the half-animal Raethians to their long-lost cousins, the Humans of Nassab.

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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Oct. 2011: Arren Screenplay pg. 1-6

We wrote the screenplays over the course of the semester in 6-page (ish) batches, so I'm going to post it the same way.

Once again, this isn't exactly representative of what the Khra-nicles are now. I also think I'd deliberately toned down the furry-ness of the characters to avoid judgment?

#old writing #writing archive #assignments #screenplay #screenwriting #Khra-nicles #Kifer #Goden Hamfas #Arren Minetelle #Rusek Cullain #10s #2011 #Age 20 #fantasy #anthro #furry

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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March 2012: dA Return Post

Once upon a time, in the far-off year of 2004, a lonely, angst-riddled thirteen-year-old got bored with <a href=”http://www.neopets.com” target=”_blank”>Neopets</a>, heard about deviantArt, and decided that that would be a lovely place to showcase her burgeoning “talent” with pen and paper and generally get really excited about anthros (furries, if you prefer). Over the course of the next four or five years, the girl grew older but no less angst-ridden and filled her deviantArt account with her drawings, photographs, writings, and long diatribes on how unfair life was (which is to say, it wasn’t unfair at all, but try telling her that). Sometime in 2008 or 2009, the girl – who had, by this time, gone from the name Rhawen Elleana Fox to Rhawen Evergreen Fox to Rhawen to Ref to Refkins – became thoroughly embarrassed of the fact that she had written any of that rambling suburban ennui and promptly set about deleting everything. The entirety of her deviantArt account was swept clean; only a message indicating that she was leaving and would not likely return and a half-finished sketch done in MS Paint were left behind.

Two thoughts contributed to this moment of destructive embarrassment. The first thought was that the girl, who had spent her middle school and high school years on the website, would soon be headed to college where her supposed vocation would switch, wholesale, from drawing to writing. There was, the girl thought, no place in the world for a young woman who liked to draw half-animal-half-human characters, who wanted to write about such characters, and who was generally “too nerdy” to be literary. The second thought was that future employers might one day see the deviantArt account and determine that the girl was the wrong fit for their company. Therefore everything had to go in a desperate attempt to preserve some socially-mandated dignity, and she left.

This, my darlings who may or may not remember this girl, was an absolutely awful idea.

The girl, whose names had now been reduced down to R[...] and Refkins, went off to college, specifically [...] College where she began with a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing (this later transformed into a BFA in WLP with a minor in Photography). The first year was abhorrent for reasons entirely unrelated to the college itself. She produced a couple of short stories that had nothing to do with the world she had been building since 2005 – a world called Khra – and had nothing to do with half-animal-half-human anythings. The stories she wrote that year did not meet her own standards. Strike one, she thought. The second year was a bit more mixed. It began poorly, but the second semester showed improvement. Again, this had nothing to do with the college itself, and everything to do with the sort of involvements the girl got herself into. This time, one of the stories she wrote revisited some characters from that period between 2004 and 2009. Perhaps you may remember them? Their names were Dani, Michael, and Calez. The first version of this story – written from Dani’s perspective – was too jumbled with a conversational tone to work effectively, but it had potential. Still, her other pieces continued to displease her.

Strike two, she thought.

In the first half of the third year - this year – the girl dabbled in screenwriting and, utterly at a loss for what she could possibly write that would be movie-worthy, she fled to the safest territory she knew: the old, unwritten novels of Khra. Perhaps you remember Arren Minetelle? If you do, then it may mean something to you when I say that the girl spent a semester writing a screenplay entirely about how Arren Minetelle defeated the Demon Kifer, that this screenplay featured Rhawen E. Fox – not the girl, mind you, just a character borrowing the name – and Unge S. Chickt and Tarrin Carithelle and Phoenix the Fire Fox. Perhaps it will mean something to you if I tell you that the character you once knew as Lucifer was renamed and became Kifer.

But perhaps you don’t remember, and if so, that is fine. Just know that the girl wrote of her world for the first time in three years, and she felt just the slightest bit better.

Following this stunt, the girl returned to short story fiction again, revised that story about Dani, Michael, and Calez so that Calez told the story instead of Dani and, in the end, produced something almost right. And so for her second story, she wrote about Unge S. Chickt and also about her characters as a concept, and, meanwhile, she saw, through her publishing courses, that graphic design suited her as did copyediting, and she began to seek out internships in those fields. To that end, the girl thought, I need to go online again. I need to post my work. And so here we are.

From the Ashes

Well that was longwinded. Hi, guys. I’m back (in a manner of speaking).

Some things have changed, and I’m inclined to give those of you who either remember me from three years ago as a particular kind of artist or followed me three years ago expecting a particular kind of product the chance to run away before your inboxes get filled with work you don’t particularly care about. What follows is the Statement of Intention for my return.

The first thing to note is that my reason for returning is driven, much like my departure, by two unequal factors. The first is that my notion of my future career currently exists somewhere in the vicinity of graphic design (specifically for print and web publishing), photography, copy editing, and (fiction) writing, all simultaneously. This is partially because I am completely unsure about what I want to do with my life (not that I know anybody who is sure) which has led me to become as much of a Renaissance Man in my chosen field(s) as possible. The other side is that I’m drawn to those differing occupations for different reasons. Photography and writing are things I enjoy doing, and I would like my work in those fields to see an audience (in the case of writing, I’d like to see my Khra stories published). However, I suspect that were I to try to pursue either of those as an actual career – some sort of nine-to-five shtick – I would swiftly come to hate them both. As that leaves finding something to do as a legitimate, predictable, gives-you-a-regular-paycheck job, graphic design and copyediting have come to the fore. Both are things I’ve always enjoyed doing, and they’re also tasks that people will always need done, but my feeling is also that they’re rather saturated fields.

Well, I live with artists, and in the art world, the only real way to succeed is to make good work and put it in enough places that people notice it. I’m adopting that methodology. As such, I’ll be posting graphic design and photographic work here. Copyediting isn’t really something that can be showcased in that way, so we won’t be dabbling in that, and my thought on written work is that if it’s good enough to post, then I ought to be sending it off to get published. I suppose it’s possible that I’ll post some writing here or there, but expect more of the visual work rather than the written.

That being said, since this is, at least partially, a professional endeavor, I will not be resuming with anthro work. I’m not an illustrator, and my drawing skills have diminished since last I posted here. Presumably I could get myself up to spec and try once more to compete with the likes of <a href=”[link]" target=”_blank”>M[...]</a>, but for me drawing has become a means to an end; it’s the way I figure out my characters, my settings, my stories. It doesn’t operate as its own entity in that sense, and often the inclusion of anthros in the drawings is incidental – more a product of my continuing discomfort with the anatomical forms of the human face than of a desire for a particular character to be an anthropomorphic animal. Again, this is a spot where I suppose it’s possible that at some point some of what amounts to concept art may please me enough that it could make its way into the gallery, but anthro work certainly won’t be the focus anymore.

Now, the second reason for my return is more sentimental. In short, I’ve missed this, and I’ve missed those of you I used to count among my friends, though we never met face-to-face. I miss the fun of creative people sharing their work and their thoughts, and I miss working on Khra more than I can say. Since I’m returning to Khra, it seems only appropriate that I return to the community I lived among when I began that work.

So, community, I don’t suppose anyone can tell me what a Sta.sh is? DeviantArt’s apparently undergone some changes, these past three or four years.

— Folks Worth Looking At

I originally wanted to include a segment directing you to the many talented folks I know (IRL, as it were) complete with descriptions of their work, but I’ve gone on long enough as is. I’ll just reduce it to the briefest of mentions, and you’ll have to decide that these folks are amazing on your own.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">M[...] B[...]</a>: She does (primarily) metalsmithing, felted animals, and anthro art. She is my best friend.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">R[...] B[...]</a>: B[...] does anthro art and metalsmithing. She’s a Chatty Cathy. Go love her.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">C[...] V[...]</a>: C[...] is a writer whose comedic stylings might bring to mind <a href=”http://www.cracked.com” target=”_blank”>Cracked</a>. He’s also my gentleman caller, and that is a brand new blog. Go give him some page views.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">T[...] B[...]</a>: T[...], a roommate of mine, is a nerdy fibers major specializing in dresses. She’s cool. Go love her.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">J[...] B[...]</a>: J[...] is another of my roommate and another fibers major, but her work differs significantly from T[...]'s. J[...] tends more towards ruminations on life, matters of the heart, and messages of calm. She’s pretty awesome and conceptual.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">S[...] G[...]</a>: Also a roommate of mine, S[...] is an animator and a ridiculously glamorous lady. She’s also amazing at hair and make-up.

<a href="[link]" target="_blank">R[...] L[...]</a>: R[...] is also a roommate and also an animator. I feel her work tends to be more contemplative than S[...]’s, but maybe that’s me. Anyway, her blog is new-begun as well so she could use some views, too. <a href=”[link]” target=”_blank”>L[...] D[...]</a>: L[...] and I went to high school together, and she is now an animator at [college]. Give her stuff a look-see, will ya?

...I’m missing a couple here, but I don’t know where their websites are (if they have websites), so we’ll settle for just this selection.

#old writing #writing archive #deviantArt #deviantArt archive #10s #2012 #Age 21 #autobiographic #me #the more of the stuff i read from this time period the more i feel like i was literally completely delusional?????.#like it's not as if things are 100% incorrect but there's this slant to everything #my perception was distorted basically

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