I had need of some sockmonkey illustrations, for Phillip’s Story, the fantastical tale of a sockmonkey who meets an oracle in a junk shop (after learning celestial navigation from some chickens) and then sets off on an epic quest to destroy the internet. So I asked my friend Lark, who’s an artist, if she would make some drawings for me. She said yes, and went right to work, steadfastly drawing in her basement apartment in Brooklyn. And today she posted the first five illustrations onto her website, and when I saw them I was so happy I could hardly talk.

You can see them here.

When the drawings are finished, which will be whenever Lark gets tired of doing them, the Brooklyn drawings and the Portland story will come together like two halves of a long-distance sandwich, and what will be left, if all goes well, is a book. I’ll either be printing it myself or doing print-on-demand (if I can find a service that does something other than ugly, glossy paperbacks) or fishing around for a publisher, which sounds discouraging and hard, and would maybe bring up issues such as the fact that my story COULD be marketed for children, except the way it’s written, I think, would be nearly impossible for a child to understand, and is very obviously, at least to me, intended for grown-ups (or at least those who have lived long enough to develop a healthy distaste for the internet, and have need of everyday magic and the ephemera of times past).

A book! A small, narrow, nicely bound book! Can you even imagine it!