Waxbloom: Chapter 1 Roughs, pt.1 (Patreon)

Been dragging my feet on finishing this up for a few weeks, life beating my ass etc... so I just wanted to go ahead and share something just so I can say i'm keeping it moving along. I'll post some other stories' thumbnails that I've been roughing out too soon, it's such a struggle for me to overcome the shyness i feel about my own original story stuff that I'm just gonna follow the compulsion to post whatever i've got and call it "behind the scenes".

I'll finish up the script accompanying these real soon too, already feel better having scanned em - disappointed them my auto document feeder feature on my scanner isn't working, i may need to pick up a dedicated smaller scanner to scan a bunch of 4x6 or 3x5 cards if i'm gonna keep doing roughs on index cards.

Now that i've got images together in a place they can be clicked through, i guess i can summarize the opening as follows.... this is me at age 18 going to Liberty University, remembering what it felt like. I got there about a week early because I was in marching band to play trumpet - I'd never been in a band before, only orchestras, but I got a scholarship so they put me in it. I didn't think much of it at the time, but looking back the campus def took on a creepier feeling when it was that empty. And I'm looking back aware of the malice and ulterior motives of the leadership (Falwell and his wife cruising for 18-year-olds to have affairs with, the racism and homophobia and transphobia, etc), so it's very much a "whited sepulchre" vibe... so i just sketched out what I could visualize. Was very challenging to even remember what happened, it's nearly been 20 years since I started there as a freshman. Immediately found it cathartic though, it's a bunch of memories I haven't touched in just as long, and I intend to keep it going and just use whatever I can pull together and see what else shakes loose from my memory. And I'm gonna let it play out in a fictionalized version of Lynchurg, VA, blended together with other places I've traveled and resonated strongly with... calling the town Waxbloom.

The protagonist (for at least some segments like this one) is just Young Jimbo - but i want to do one more degree of separation rather than just have it be my fursona Jimbo the husky, prob gonna go with the name "Art", short for Arthur. I've always told ppl my favorite class I ever took in all my time at Liberty was Arthurian Legend, as my professor was way more of the C.S. Lewis kind of actual fun christian who clearly found the university's fundamentalist culture kinda stuffy and embraced the looser pagan roots of early christianity, and where it mingled with the early mythmaking of places like Ireland and Scotland, places where I have a lot of family connections I've started exploring more over the last year and a half. I've been collecting Celtic folklore books ever since, I learned more from that class about how to learn than anything else in 4 years. So prob gonna call this version of me Art. Also overlaps with an overriding theme of my life - been saying since i could hold a pencil that I wanted to be an artist, and here I am. Pins a lot of things together. I'll expound on some more personal significance of the imagery i'm going with later on, once I'm sure i'll keep it in there.

The "B-side" stuff at the end is Page the fox, pulling from some of the notes I've been writing over the last couple years for a Zelda-like game. Initially I was only gonna follow Page, but I found it a lot more entertaining to imagine following a variety of characters Twin Peaks-style, and just hop over and see what misadventures Page is getting into if things are getting too blue, like getting terrorized by Scottish folklore monsters for a chuckle. Whenever I have the time to build more stuff in Godot I'll be able to nail down some more mechanics for them being an N64 platformer / RPG protagonist, min-maxxing their way through a survival horror while Art blunders his way through college life just a few blocks away, but for now I'm treating the Page segments as a test chamber for how things could look and feel in a game where you play as them. I'll intersperse a couple more scenes of Page dealing with

This is probably 2/3 of what I wanna do for Chapter 1, drawn back in like... late August? early September? Wanted to have this whole chapter ready to share by the end of September, as my therapist pointed out that other 18-year-olds will be starting college, and some might be in a similar scenario to me, and I'd love to hurry up and get this stuff out there to encourage others trapped in a fundamentalist environment that you don't have to settle for being suffocated... but funeral travel interfered with that timeline, alas. But I'm also feeling some fresh vision now that I've got everything laid out in front of me like this, maybe I can cram some more in within the next day or two.

If it takes me too long to finish roughing this out and to clean things up well enough to call them "done" and post the story, then I'll work up the courage to post the script that accompanies these roughs. I don't want to get too bogged down perfecting these things, and want it to feel more like a sequence of storyboards for a movie, where there's juuust enough detail to convey the setting and essential info. It's a whole art form unto itself, and I'm looking forward to getting more proficient in it, enough to make it resemble more of the kinda thing you'd see from early Don Bluth and Disney films.

(Also edited to be visible on all tiers, not just highest tier, felt bad for posting so little lately and wanna make sure my supporters get to see what I've been up to.)