Howdy! This is just a little behind-the-scenes essay about my latest short story, The Gytrash- here I’ll cover the research, inspirations, the cover art, writing process, several deleted scenes, and a bunch of other stuff that went into writing this. This was a long one to write, so it has an equally long essay accompanying it. Buckle up!
Obviously spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read the story already you can do so below:
Research & Inspirations
Dead Rabbit, Listverse, et al
As stated in the postscript, the primary source which inspired me to write this story was an episode of Dead Rabbit Radio- Episode 119- The Guytrash: The Shape-shifting Horror of Britain!
A brief aside- this is now the third story I’ve written based on something I learned from Dead Rabbit Radio, the first two being Proriger and The Severed Head, and I assure you it will not be the last. Once again I am compelled to state what an inspiration the show has been to me, both in matter of content and the pure creative drive of Jason, the show’s host. I’ve been listening to Dead Rabbit Radio since the show started way back in 2018 and he’s never skipped a beat. Truly the best paranormal, conspiracy, and true crime podcast out there, and I cannot recommend it enough. If you enjoy my writing, by extension you enjoy Dead Rabbit Radio.1
Episode 119 is where I first heard of the creature known as the Gytrash, one of the many, many iterations of the “black dog” phenomena, and in my view the most interesting. I’ll get into the details of the Gytrash as a creature a bit more below, but my most important takeaway was that it is a creature of crossroads, of borderlands. This features heavily in The Gytrash. They were also very commonly sighted across England at least into the 1880s, which brings me to the next and most immediate inspiration for the story.
While foreknowledge of what a Gytrash is was essential, the most immediate source that kicked off my creative drive to write this story was an article on Listverse- 10 Paranormal Mysteries That Are Not Paranormal Mysteries by Garth C Haslam.
Entry #4, Heaven Help Us, was what got my imagination rolling. Here the author recounts some faxlore where a young woman walking home at night decides to take a shortcut through an alley, and to her despair she sees a sinister-looking man standing at the other end. She prays to God to protect her from harm and, suddenly, a strong sense of comfort and safety washed over her. She didn’t feel like she was walking alone at all, and managed to get past the man without incident. The next day in the newspaper the girl read that another woman was raped in the same alley not half an hour after she herself passed through. Of course the girl goes to the police and is able to point out the suspicious man from a suspect lineup. She points out the guy from the alley, he breaks down and confesses, and when asked why he didn’t bother our protagonist, he replies that she wasn’t alone and had two “tall men” walking on either side of her. These “tall men” are suggested to be angels, sent by God to protect the girl from the rapist.
I first heard this story YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEARS ago, it is a very old urban legend. So imagine my shock at finding out this story is true… with a canine twist.
Haslam did some exemplary detective work and managed to connect this tale back to turn-of-the-century England, where the following event was reported:
Early in the 20th century, a lady [the mother of an acquaintance of Ms Rudkin] had walked from her home in Old Crosby towards the nearby village of Scunthorpe to do some shopping. All of that went normally, but when she was returning alone much later in the day, a large black dog suddenly trotted up to her and began walking alongside. Very shortly she came to a place on the road where some roughian laborers were standing around. They made little attempt to conceal their feelings and the lady heard them say that if she didn't have that @#%#(@ dog with her, they could think of a few things to do with her. The dog accompanied her all the way to her home gate, and she called to her husband to come see the fine companion --- but it had disappeared.
This is a great story in its own right. I much prefer it over the angel faxlore one, for the simple reason that it addresses the glaring question of why didn’t the other girl get an angelic bodyguard? Did she not pray hard enough? In this version, there is no other girl, and the dog arrives for this specific situation. It’s also a bit more up in the air if it was really a paranormal phenomena- it could have just been a particularly friendly stray who was aware of the danger that lay ahead. I enjoy that sort of “maybe magic, maybe mundane” vagueness in stories.
But, though great on its own, this one simple paragraph BEGGED to be turned into a proper story, and soon became the 12,000 word saga of The Gytrash.
Adapting The Story
With all of this in mind, I decided to include a bit of both versions in my own telling. The tension was ratcheted up considerably by making the hooligans a known rape gang with several prior victims, and the reason the Gytrash didn’t intervene in those other cases is simply because they occurred outside of his territory. He’s just a dog- a paranormal dog, to be sure, but not an angel, and he isn’t able to be everywhere to help everyone. He helps Denali specifically because she wandered onto his turf and he chose to aide her.
The police part of the faxlore story, where the rapist is identified directly by the protagonist, was also modified quite a bit. Instead of a police lineup, the rape gang is busted by one of their number being bitten by the Gytrash. Part of the lore of the Gytrash is that if you are bitten by one, the wound will never heal, so he just keeps bleeding and is readily identified from the bite. Not patting myself on the back necessarily, but I thought that was a pretty clever way to weave folklore into detective work, small though that part of the story may be.
Other Inspiring Tales
Before we get into what exactly a Gytrash is, I do want to briefly go over some other inspirations for the story. H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Street was hugely influential. It’s one of my favorite short stories, and its core concept of a place itself having a soul and being able to embrace or reject changes imposed upon it is plainly echoed in my own tale. The Gytrash is far more personalized than The Street, of course, being an individual paranormal guardian as opposed to Lovecraft’s more distributed genius loci, but they are otherwise quite similar.
The tone of the piece was also hugely inspired by The Street, especially the scene where the Gytrash rakes his memory to recall what the hell exactly happened to his home. If I’m being perfectly honest, The Gytrash might best be considered an homage to The Street, and there are a plethora of references to this great story in The Gytrash. Highly recommend it.
The Taking by Dean Koontz was another influential work. Two particular elements were on my mind while writing this story- the claustrophobic fog that smothers the town and conceals all manner of threats from the heroes, and the character of the dog Virgil. Without spoiling anything, Virgil and dogs in general play a major role in The Taking and are strongly implied to have a sort of connection to the unsettling phenomena at the center of the plot. This higher awareness of the situation was something I wanted to instill in the Gytrash, though their roles are totally reversed- Virgil is a normal animal up against very alien forces, whereas the Gytrash is an explicitly paranormal entity going toe-to-toe with normal criminals.
Finally, the novels Thor by Wayne Smith and Snow Dog by Jim Kjelgaard were great inspirations as well, specifically with the scenes from the Gytrash’s point-of-view. These authors both excelled at getting inside a dog’s head, writing the world as a dog would actually see it, and that’s something I’ve always wanted to try my hand at in my own writing.
Temple University
The story takes place in and around Temple University’s campus, in North Philadelphia. I attended Temple for a short stint, so I was able to impart a little bit of my geographical knowledge of the area into the story.
One thing Denali alludes to in the story is her father taking her for “The Drive.” That’s something my father took me on, and many other Temple students from the Philly region- more specifically those of us in police families- went through as well. Basically, he took me for a drive around Temple’s immediate environs. Sounds simple enough, until you realize Temple University is a nice school in the middle of one of the most crime-ridden urban areas in the United States. The whole thing is basically meant to ask “are you sure about this?” and to make you aware of the perils of going off-campus.
The Gang
The rapist-killer gang which the Gytrash knows as “The Hurting Men” were largely inspired by the Central Park Five and the Zebra Killers. The first of these were just opportunistic savages- who WERE guilty beyond reasonable doubt, despite that ridiculous, politically motivated miscarriage of justice by the New York court- and the second was a vicious gang of serial killers who targeted white people specifically and killed at least fifteen people, possibly over seventy.
The gang was initially written to be far more explicitly racially motivated- see the deleted scene below- and I still envision them this way. They specifically targeted white female students, and would have gotten Denali too had it not been for the Gytrash’s timely arrival.
All The Pretty Gytrashes
So what is a Gytrash, exactly?
Well, they were a kind of supernatural dog described most commonly in English folklore, but could also be found in other parts of Europe and, naturally, transplanted to America by European settlers. They were usually very large, associated with storms, and live in desolate, liminal spaces like crossroads, gateways, ruins, churchyards, bridges, wilderness regions, or county lines.
They really did make a weird sound when they walked- variously described as like stepping on wet pebbles, jangling coins, and dragging a chain- and they really were purported to have used puddles and other bodies of water to instantaneously teleport between locations2. The very name “Gytrash” is supposedly an onomatopoeia of the sound they’d make when diving into or emerging from a body of water, supposedly similar to dropping a rock into a pond- Gy-trashhhhhh!
It also had a strange relationship with humans. Firstly, they were extremely common- nearly every town in England had its own local Gytrash. Unlike many other types of ghosts or faeries or cryptids3, it didn’t really harm people, but rather was simply a mischievous trickster spirit, following lone travelers from the shadows and sometimes teasing them by running directly at them and then performing its signature disappearing act right at their feet. It was often associated with bad luck, but also counterintuitively, as we’ve seen, occasionally protected people, acting almost like a sort of guardian angel.
The most famous depictions of a Gytrash, and similar such black dogs, are found in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Notably, in neither of these stories does a real Gytrash actually make an appearance- Jane mistakes in quick succession a horse and a dog for a Gytrash, and Holmes’s Hound is (spoiler alert) a normal dog broken into bloodlust by a cruel master. It is largely thanks to these two works that the memory of the Gytrash was preserved at all.
You may have noticed by now that I’ve been referring to these spectral dogs in the past-tense, and that’s because the Gytrash is one of the rare instances of a spirit/cryptid which has- probably- gone extinct. And due to anthropogenic causes no less! As England became more densely populated during the Industrial Revolution, and towns and cities spread further and further out into the countryside, the Gytrash’s preferred liminal haunts were subsumed by the urban sprawl. Additionally, they were highly intolerant of the new electric lighting. These two factors led to a near-total cessation of spectral black dog sightings in England. They were creatures of a much older world of Faerie, and couldn’t persist in this new order of copper and silicon, so they vanished4.
Every ounce of this made it into my story’s depiction of the animal. It is, as near as I can tell, 100% true to folklore.
I scattered little hints throughout the story that the Gytrash’s power was unusually strong on the night of the story. The journey includes multiple successive thresholds- it’s near midnight when Denali meets him, right after a storm, they’re in a particularly forlorn area with plenty of crossroads and ruins, and the neighborhood is on the border between the university and the ghetto, which is not only a boundary between knowledge and learning, but also wealth and poverty. And let us not forget too that Denali herself is at a crossroads in life, slowly moving out of her grief and back into some kind of normalcy. This confluence of events all helped to keep the Gytrash’s power from waning despite the sprawl and electricity ruining his home. Not sure if it carried through in the actual telling, but that’s what I was going for.
One exceedingly odd bit of trivia I learned as I was writing the story is that the Gytrash’s place of origin- that is, the location where spectral black dogs were actually called Gytrash- was the West Riding of Yorkshire. Completely coincidental to this, the British Midlands region of which Yorkshire is a part also had the highest concentration of Quakers in England, and was the preeminent source of settlers in Pennsylvania. The Gytrash being born in the West Riding and hitching a ride to Philadelphia completely fits both the region’s history and folklore. This was a total accident, I did not structure the plot around this in any way and only learned it after the story was mostly complete.
The actual appearance of the Gytrash is a bit vague, besides being a large, black dog. In a way this makes sense- dog breeds as we recognize them today did not properly exist when the Gytrash was running around, and dogs were instead categorized by their role. So, there were herding dogs, coursing dogs like greyhounds, mastiffs, scenthounds, and lapdogs… and that was about it. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that distinctive dog breeds like Yorkies and Alsatians and Dalmatians really came into being.
With a rather wide canvas open to me, I decided to mix a few different dog breeds into my Gytrash. The main one was the Irish Wolfhound. This is a rather old type of dog- the Romans reference them, and they feature rather prominently in Celtic mythology, so they are no stranger to supernatural associations.
It was a bit ironic to give the wolfhound a wolf’s eyes, since they were bred specifically to hunt wolves, but the Gytrash is a bundle of contradictions so it fits in an odd sort of way. This yin-yang synthesis of wolfhound and wolf also oddly fits the breed’s history. When the last wolf in Ireland was killed in 1786, the wolfhound was instantly rendered obsolete and soon descended into an extinction spiral from which it only barely recovered- and not quite in its original form- thanks to the efforts of Royal Army officer George Augustus Graham. Not only does this fit with the Gytrash’s own sad apparent extinction, but it also shows the necessity of preserving both dark and light, wild and tame forces in the order of the world. The wolfhound needs the wolf to live. The Gytrash is a synthesis of the two, a personification of this exact balance which has been thrown out of whack by the cancer-like march of civilization across all the wilderness of the world.
Getting back to the actual appearance of the animal, real wolfhounds tend to have very thin, ropy tails- some indeed appear nearly hairless. This look didn’t really appeal to me, so I gave my Gytrash a far bushier, “featherduster” tail like that of a Newfoundland. Finally, I gave him far larger paws, more akin to a Great Dane’s, which seemed more able to cause such a jangling gait.
Also, the description of the Gytrash’s immense size was not any sort of exaggeration, to either the folkloric dog or the real wolfhound. Irish Wolfhounds really do get big enough for a mite of a girl like Denali to look one in the eye.
Writing Process
This story was a complete mess to write, even though I am generally pleased with the final result. Despite seeming rather straightforward- girl walks home alone at night, meets strange dog, dog protects her from rapists- this story unfortunately took many moons to write and was a lot more work than I’d anticipated. I actually started it way back in March, when the story is set, and was expecting it to take maybe two weeks to write? In reality, it didn’t wind up being ready until mid-July, whereupon it was shelved for several months to age before hauling it out to make some final revisions taking place the day before publication.
The main issue with it was simple character motivation. Why was Denali out and about despite being aware of the imminent danger of the rape-gang? Why did the Gytrash decide to help her? These were issues that I didn’t resolve until almost the final draft- the story has been mostly written with these elephants still lingering in the room.
The Gytrash’s motivation was easier to solve. Being a paranormal entity, he basically soulgazed Denali and found her worthy of salvation. More than this, though, he saw in her shades of the world he’d lost, and hope for its eventual restoration in the future. This tugged at some very deep, precious philosophical concepts of mine which I don’t have space to elaborate on here, and they’re better left up in the air anyhow.
It seems like such a simple thing in the story you’ve just finished reading, but it really troubled me coming up with a motivation for Denali. Obviously she would be a complete idiot to just wander around that neighborhood for no reason, which is more or less what she did in the initial draft, and this idiocy had the effect of making her a rather unlikable character. Rereading the initial drafts, I thought that as a reader I would not care what happened to her.
I went through a few variants of motivation for her, none of them very compelling- the one I kept coming back to was that she had just gone through a bad breakup and wanted to walk home so she could mope to herself. This wasn’t terrible, but neither was it a good story. It did not account for the insane danger Denali was willing to subject herself to on that walk, and it was only by the inclusion of loss into Denali’s character that the story finally fit together. The whole rest of the story is defined by losses of various degrees- the loss of the Gytrash’s world to the tide of progress, the loss of innocent lives to Selim’s gang, the loss of old Philadelphia to both of these, and now, finally, the personal loss of Denali’s sister.
Here now Denali and the Gytrash’s motives were at last in concordance- Denali had lost her beloved sister, while the Gytrash had lost his entire world. Of course they would find each other and work together.
As for the rest of the story, the basic plot beats were easy enough to write. I must confess that I may have overindulged in one of my decadences- ornate scenery descriptions- but I did at least try to make it all serve the story in setting the mood and building tension.
Deleted Scenes
Being so long in the shipyard, The Gytrash went through many drafts before publication, and there were quite a few deleted scenes. This was another thing about the story I regret- many hours wound up being wasted tidying up these scenes that just didn’t work and wouldn’t make it into the finished cut. So, to perhaps gain something back for the effort which went into writing them, I include them here for your enjoyment/amusement.
As stated, one of the issues I had was with character motivations for Denali and the Gytrash, and several scenes related to this were deleted from the final cut. One such scene was an introduction showing Denali in class, her mind wandering in a depressed fugue due to her recent breakup with her boyfriend-
Up on the tenth floor of Gladfelter Hall, Denali Brinton watched such a storm roll over the city from where she sat by a broad window facing the Delaware River. Her calculus professor’s words were as formless in her ears as the chaotic patter of rain upon the glass. It was a scene from Lenape legend- the forces of the sky waging war upon the broad, glassy sheet of the river- and it seemed a perfect match to the melancholy maelstrom roiling about in her own heart.
“Denali, how would you denote this derivative?”
The professor’s voice skewered her ruminations and she jolted up and away from the window. One of her classmates stifled a giggle, like this were third grade and not a college course. Denali glared at her. It was Nicole. She didn’t dislike the girl but she had the same stupid hairstyle as stupid Brynley, a stupid dirty blonde ponytail with stupid curtain bangs. Denali’s narrowed eyes only made her giggle more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Denali brushed a loose chestnut wisp away from her face and glanced discreetly down at her notes. What did he ask? Something about derivatives? Define? No, denote. There, that’s it- how do you denote a derivative?
“Well, under Leibniz’s notation,” she answered rotely, twirling her hand and sprinkling in random bits of emphasis to make it seem less canned. Later on she wouldn’t recall the rest of her answer, only that somehow she arrived at the conclusion of three over five.
“Very good,” her tutor nodded. He turned towards the giggler, “Now, Nicole, how would you calculate the slopes of the secant lines?”
“I- uhmmm…”
Denali sighed. With the spotlight off her, she rested her chin in her hand and once more stared out into the fury of the storm, indistinct as it was through the rainspattered window. She should’ve paid attention. Her grades had been in the gutter all semester. But in her heart she knew the true cause of her academic cliff-dive, and it wasn’t any inability to understand the material. It was Justin. She thought back to their last date together. Hand in hand, prancing around the Christmas Village at Dilworth Plaza. They’d gone ice skating together. Rode the ferris wheel. She’d dropped her bratwurst right out of her mouth when it was too hot, and he’d given her his without a second thought and gone back to get another. She couldn’t understand it. She thought he’d loved her. Well, maybe he had, but his camera roll showed he was busy loving Brynley too. She’d thrown him out and he’d left her only with the eternal why- why could boys break hearts?
I am not a romance writer- nor, for that matter, a mathematician- and I think that is very apparent in this excerpt. The last paragraph is painfully cringeworthy- I managed to salvage a few sentences about her academic decline in the final draft, but the rest about her boyfriend deserved to be scrapped even if I had managed to fit it into the narrative somehow.
My main issue with writing romance and breakups, in my estimation, is that I have thankfully never experienced the heartbreak of a relationship ending on awful terms, while I have had more than my share of bereavement. With that in mind, I decided to venture back to more familiar waters and change Denali into a grieving sister- this had the twin benefits of a) being far cleaner to write, and b) finally giving Denali an understandable reason to be skipping curfew and sneaking around through such an insanely dangerous “hood.”
Another, shorter scene outlined Denali’s relationship to her friend Angie, who in the final cut is only alluded to briefly, and included a description of her neighborhood-
She cursed herself once more for not staying the night at Angie’s. Angie, one of her fellow night owls taking remedial calculus, lived in a swanky two-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of Morgan Hall. Her father was a banker. Denali’s father was an auto mechanic, so she lived in a rented rowhome seven blocks off campus that she could afford by waitressing at a Center City steakhouse. It was a nice home in a slag vat neighborhood that teemed with all the wretched refuse of humanity. All of North Philly was like that, a sea of darkness only occasionally broken up by gentrified atolls, little white islets sometimes composed of but a half block of houses. The rent was cheap, the danger high. Her four roommates were pleasant, but they had the common sense to be home before dark.
Well, you should’ve known better, she thought, Dad gave you The Drive before you enrolled. Everyone told you Temple is in a dangerous neighborhood, even before all this started. You take your life into your hands every time you go off campus. Well, here it is. In your hands.
Again, this interrupted the story’s flow and was superfluous to the other lavish descriptions of the decay in North Philadelphia. I’d already shown the rot, I didn’t need to tell you again that she lived in a crummy neighborhood.
There was also a lengthy scene immediately following this, after Denali mentally notes- “You take your life into your hands every time you go off campus. Well, here it is. In your hands” in which I, as the narrator, explained at length the background of the rape-gang running amok in North Philadelphia-
The great terror started back in October. That was when they found Tiffany Carvallo dead in a gutter the morning after a Halloween party- beaten, then worse. Fists and kicks and at least one lead pipe, per the coroner’s report. She was dressed as Catwoman and her blood alcohol content was point-two-eight. Grainy security footage showed her staggering down West Norris Street, eight blocks off campus, closely tailed by five masked and hooded jackals. The police investigated, the campus mourned, and the funeral was held. Life went on, or at least it was supposed to. But it didn’t.
In quick succession, three others were killed- Jill Pevensey, Erica Gaines, and Amelia Deane. All slaughtered in the same appalling fashion, all by night, all by the same five men, per the DNA and camera footage. They were bold as hyenas, black of skin and blacker of soul.
After Erica was killed, the police had swarmed upon Temple like a nest of angry hornets. Their blinking sirens a new, incessant feature of campus life, as regular as the rhythm of chirping crickets. Anyone who looking remotely suspicious was stopped and questioned, and a drone overwatch was established over an eight-block perimeter around the university, with the aim of giving police ample alert to any groups of young men prowling after dark.
Of the constellation of gangs surrounding Temple- the 6ixers, J Street Crew, Zoo Gang, Da Jungle, Reezyworld, et al- the law said much but could prove little. There were many tips given and warrants served and nighttime raids; once a gunfight in the wee hours had awoken Denali from a fitful, pre-exam slumber. But the gangs were great in number, and whenever one of their ranks was detained, he invariably professed no knowledge of the slayings, beyond what had already been heard on the news.
For its part, the school organized safety convoys for girls who had to venture off campus, while strongly encouraging them not to do so for any nonessential reason. It brought sneers from some of the students- how patronizing, the big strong men with their guns coming to defend the helpless, naive girls! And let’s not even talk about the racial angle of it all!- but nevertheless, not even the most vociferous of the deriders strayed out past dark. Denali herself didn’t hold any strong opinions on the matter, so preoccupied was she with exams and her deteriorating relationship with Justin. She only hoped the police would catch whoever was responsible quickly so campus life could return to normal.
There was a dry spell over winter, but then like clockwork the killings resumed on March 14, during a fierce snow squall that grounded the drones and confined even the most diligent policemen to their squad cars. That morning, Kelly Byrne’s body was found in a vacant lot at 10th and Oxford, and spring break ended with a bleak lockdown of the campus. The police went back to on-foot beat patrols like it was the 1890s. Young women were told not to wander after dark for any reason unless in a group, and rape whistles were provided free of charge by the university. Denali had picked one up and had it dangling round her neck now, next to her Rosary, but she doubted it would do her any good.
Here again you can plainly see the influence of The Street upon the narrative, basically to the point of aping it. Despite rather liking it even unpolished, it had to go because it interrupted the story’s flow and felt far too preachy. Even if there is often a political undertone to my stories, I never want them to come off as lecturing the reader. First of all, it’s not enjoyable for readers, and secondly it’s patronizing when authors try to tell you what to think, rather than nudging you a certain direction and letting you figure it out for yourself. I think the final version of the story avoided these issues.
What I replaced this TED Talk with were more “showing, not telling” scenes, such as when Denali meets the policemen, her mention of the curfews and drone overwatch, her having a rape whistle, the newspaper being sucked down the gutter, Denali’s own mounting terror of the Hurting Men, and of course the men listening to insidious antiwhite gangster rap and outright mentioning Denali’s race being a factor in their targeting of her. This made them into far more ominous villains, rather than just splurging all info about them in one go. I do kind of wish I had been able to include a little more info about them, but there are enough clues there for the reader to figure it out.
One other oddity that wound up not making it into the final draft was toying with the idea of making the Gytrash’s scenes first-person; ultimately decided against this because the whiplash of changing perspectives in such a manner seemed too much, and for a story such as this I preferred the third-person anyway.
Cover Art
To help ground my descriptions of the creature, I actually made the Gytrash in Gimp, taking a stock photo of an Irish Wolfhound and giving it a wolf’s eyes. Also fiddled with the brightness and contrast to make the coat darker than the actual dog’s. The result was a pretty cool, eerie looking animal. I then took the dog out of the original photo background and fitted it over a stock image of a Philadelphia alley scene. Then, for the final touch, I fed the image into Grok and prompted it to transform the image into a “dark charcoal sketch.” I then layered this AI edited version on top of my original Gimp composition and turned down its opacity until the dog had this weird, half-illustrated half-photographed look to him.
Th AI version included a cool effect, with the Gytrash’s body kind of fading out into sketched lines at the bottom, which I kept in the final composition. I did not specifically prompt it to do that, but it fits with the notion of the Gytrash having only one paw in our world at any given time, while he really dwells someplace more transcendent.
I’m not overall happy with this. The final result is visually pleasing, sure, but I don’t like that the key component that makes it work was AI-generated. Even though it was mostly my own effort in Gimp, relying any amount on AI just doesn’t sit right with me. Would much rather have had a proper illustration for the cover, but my drawing skills just aren’t there yet to achieve the kind of creative self-sufficiency I crave. Someday soon they will be, but not yet.
I hope- for those of you who made it this far- that this wasn’t too boring a read, or that it felt overly indulgent. I always enjoy when other writers and artists discuss their own techniques and inspirations, so I figure there’s a small chance you guys might enjoy hearing a bit about mine.
That’s all. You can go home now.
This is NOT a paid promotion, I just genuinely enjoy the show and want other people to enjoy it too.
According to some versions, it doesn’t need to jump into a puddle- sometimes, it would jump directly into the ground and disappear as if the ground below it were deep water.
The Gytrash is sort of an odd mélange of all three.
Perhaps one day they’ll return, as fossil fuel supplies run out and the world is forced back into preindustrial conditions. We can hope!