I made another little animation thing around The Ballad of Philicio Nightly, a podcast radio drama and eBook I’ll be putting out later this month, and it took about 24 hours from conception to completion. I had a nice time tinkering with the one-page script for it on Friday evening, then drawing the stick figures on Saturday morning at work, then recording it and editing the whole thing together in the evening. Posted it to Instagram at like 11 p.m.

After it was done I felt exhausted and went to lay down on the couch where, with my phone, I watched the completed video nine or ten times in a row. So delighted with it, silly as it is.

I would have beensuper embarrassed if there was anybody who might have caught me watching my own work like that, listening to my own voice, smiling so wide about it. But it wasn’t that I was laughing at the material or even marveling at it. There’s just something spellbinding about looking at the moving, talking, now-public thing that I literally just imagined 24 hours ago. Wrote it and drew the whole thing with my hands and gave it my voice through the recording (hopefully the writing too).

It sounds heavy to put it that way, but it was a heavy thing to experience. Always is. I felt different about myself when I shuffled to bed a few minutes later. Felt like I’d left somebody manning the posts.

Like if anybody went looking for me that night, they coulda seen that video, and found me.