A February Update
Livestreams, Patreon update, and a Storied Drawing!
Hello dX creatives!!!
We’re so happy you’re here and a part of what we’re growing - a wholistic collaborative where creatives support creatives.
In this issue:
Catch the Latest Livestream?
What’s New in Patreon
The Unlikely Climber - a Storied Drawing
Did you know? - You Can Practice Being Observant With Haiku
Subscribe to dX platforms
Catch the Latest Livestream?
Parz goes live weekly (Sunday 9am, Bangkok time) to talk creative writing, creativity, and whatever else has captured his attention that week. In his latest one, he leads watchers through what he calls Seed Word Germination - essentially generating your own prompts and then using them to create a story.
Curious to learn more? Click the link below!
(And if you haven’t subscribed to our channel yet, please click here!)
What’s New in Patreon
Aside from the library of dX class videos in the Patreon library, we’re dropping collaborations between Aleesha and Parz - we call them Storied Drawings. Check them out here!
What do Storied Drawings look like? Keep reading…
The Unlikely Climber - a Storied Drawing
Art by Aleesha, Prose by Parz
This is a story about a drop of water. Not a big one like what drips from a sink tap but instead a single solitary water drop. His formal name is the same as every other drop’s - Molecule - but he calls himself M’Kewl.
M’Kewl doesn’t think of himself as special in any noticeable way. He looks just like any other water drop with two small Hydrogen atoms stuck onto his big Oxygen atom body in such a way that humans think of Mickey Mouse when they see pictures. And M’Kewl appeared on Earth along with most other drops long before anyone could conceive of words like “exist” or “aware”. But he is different in one important way - he wants to do something no other drop has ever done before (or at least not that he’s heard!). He wants to climb mountains.
Many drops have been to all sorts of places. In fact, the single greatest pleasure of water drops is to tell stories about all the places they’ve been - atop Andean peaks, diving to the deepest depths of the Pacific, and residing within the bodies of billions of living things of every shape, colour, and size - and to share dreams of future adventures. But no one talks about climbing mountains.
All drops know the basics of watery life, things like evaporation and condensation, and, above all, what they call the Great Rest (what humans call Freezing Cold). Most drops see these things as limits to what they can do, but M’Kewl saw them as things to overcome in order to climb mountains.
Sometimes drops fall onto a mountain as mist or rain. Sometimes they’re transported by a living thing and left behind as breath, sweat, or urine. But no drop has actually climbed a mountain on its own. M’Kewl was certain he could succeed where others had barely tried to climb mountains.
As he began formulating his plan, he shared it with anyone who’d listen. He told clams and kelp - they said he was crazy. He told shrimps and snails - they said he was crazy. He told fishes of every species - they said he was crazy. Even when he told porpoises, penguins, and polar bears, they all said he was crazy! “Little Molecule!”, they cried, “It’s silly to think you can climb mountains!”
Undeterred, he located a promising river and entered. The further he traveled, the harder it became to progress, but progress he made. Dams, pipes, splashes, sprays, and the ever present danger of evaporation (and having to start all over again) - he overcame them all. And all the while everyone on the way down cried that he was in the way, that he should turn around and follow along the same way they were. But still he continued to climb the mountain.
He was in mid-climb when he encountered me.
And who am I? No one special in any noticeable way; just someone who likes to sit beside a cool rushing stream and dream dreams. M’Kewl waved to me from a bit of moss next to an eddy where I was soaking my feet and told me all about his journeyings, his dreams, his intended goal. After a time, he left to continue climbing again.
And he may very well be climbing still.
Climb on, you crazy dreamer. Climb on.
Did You Know… ?
…You Can Practice Being Observant With Haiku!
Parz’s creative process boils down to three parts:
Observing
Scribing
Editing
As an exercise when observing an idea, try noting your ideas in the form of haiku. The haiku form encourages the use of just a few words to encapsulate ideas (and becomes, on their own, creative writing in their own right).
For instance, after watching my cat attack something lying in wait behind my duvet (and that something turned out to be absolutely nothing), the haiku that bubbled up was this:
today I attacked
the ghost of what I attacked
yesterday
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Thank you for joining us on this journey. We look forward to co-creating this space with you!
~Parz