Emergent properties, of a sort

As my drawing skill progresses – slowly, sometimes staggering, but always the general movement is forward – I’ve found there are things I can’t visualize.  It’s not that I never will, but I haven’t trained my brain to do that yet. Fortunately, I’ve been building rulesets to accommodate problems my entire life, this is only one more example.

The basic problem is this: for large inanimate objects such as trees and buildings, and a small subset of small inanimate objects, I’ve learned (in some way) how to draw these objects from various points of view and in perspective. I’m not good at it yet but there is some perception of depth and you can understand what I’m trying to convey.

But with many small objects and animals (including people) – well, I haven’t learned to do that yet. I can draw an animal at a 90-degree angle (profile or straight on) but I can’t draw from, say, looking up as a child might see a parent or looking down as a parent might see a child. I’ve been able to get around that by having models of people to give me a hard object to move around and look at from various angles. (In case you’re interested, I’m using the Body Kun and Body Chan figures.) I use items around the house for other things.

But animals are another matter. They don’t stand still long enough. Yes, there are reference images galore on Google, but trying to find the right pose can be time-consuming… and if I’m drawing something that doesn’t exist except in my head, I can’t find the pose I’m looking for anyway.

So I hit on a solution: sculpting. Clay is pretty cheap and I’m fairly good at model-making, so I’ve started practicing making clay figures of the things in my head. Scary, man! Seriously, I’ll make, say, a dragon head. Once that’s done, I can rotate it to see how to draw it from any angle.

I didn’t start out drawing to become a sculptor – but it led in that direction. Sometimes the paths we follow cannot be predicted.

Building a Dragon, Part Two

Last week’s sketches were of an amulet and a couple of stick-figure dragons to show how it moves. The amulet is the dragon’s dormant stage, highly resistant to heat, pressure, and anything else short of a neutron star or black hole.

These two sketches are different, active poses. They’re rough sketches, not intended to be close to the final product (I’m not even going to ink them); I’m trying to draw what I want to see.

Remember, it’s a space dragon, not meant to land anywhere but to travel empty space. There are three nostrils; not 100% sure why I did that, I’ll think of something. The horns and dorsal spines burn with fire when the dragon’s fed; if the fire goes out it needs to eat. The arms and tail flange capture bits of planets and stellar material (plasma, mostly).

(Very) rough sketches for my dragon.

Building a dragon, Part One

So I’m sitting in the lab waiting to give a sample for blood work. It’s gonna be a long wait and I realize, “Hey, why sit and do nothing? You need to design the dragon and its ‘dormancy’ amulet for Do-Over. Go next door and buy a cheap sketchbook and pen.” It’s not on the Inktober official list – I could call it “mysterious”. Nah – I’ve already done that one. Never mind – but it’s work I needed to do. Keep in mind these are concept drawings, like an outline for a story, not meant to be finished product.

Potential stumbling block: quoting song lyrics

(Note: this originally appeared, in a shorter and slightly different form, in one of my Facebook posts in a private group. I’ve also asked this as a question in LinkedIn; I received the same answer there as I did from the copyright attorney.)

Are you writing something with published song lyrics in it? Guess what: if the song was written after 1923, you have to pay to use the lyrics. Copyright laws on songs aren’t different from literature laws, but the music industry is more prone to lawsuits than the literature industry.

You can (usually) use a line or two from a written work if you cite it as “quote (author, title of work, date)”, but you can’t us a song lyric without paid permission except under fair use, which is generally limited to parody, review, critique, or something similar.

So if I want my protagonist to sing even one line from Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song” I have to either write, “JD sings Jim Croce’s I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song to Mya”, or fork over some cash to the Croce estate (or whoever owns the copyright to that song). I only want two lines, not the whole bloody song…

I need to do this. One of the books I’m writing has a protagonist with autism; he’s non-verbal and communicates by writing notes or singing. Most of the time I can obliquely reference the song (e.g., he sang something about a watchtower, a joker, and a thief) or directly by title (e.g., “Oh, that’s Behind Blue Eyes by The Who”), but when a critical emotional state comes along and he wants to express himself in a very specific way (see the previous paragraph)… he CAN’T because I can’t quote a song. That’s annoying.

I asked for legal advice and that’s the response I got, along with a few names of agencies that would help me get in touch with whoever owns the lyric copyright so I can pay them. At US$30 – US$50 per use (or more!), it adds up.

Or I can write my own songs. I have taken this tack at times, but in some cases (such as the Croce song) the existing written word fits both the situation and the character I’ve written. There are people like that in the real world, so it fits the character’s personality and sets the mood properly. To make the character credible I have to write him as if he were a real person – and real people quote songs they know.

So here’s how I’m doing it. In an author note at the bottom of the page, I have the following. “If you want the full emotional experience of this page, pull out a legally-acquired copy of Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song” and play it while you read this.” I’ve been assured that’s legal. Kinda loses something that way, though….

Here’s an article on BookBaby regarding this situation: How To Legally Quote Song Lyrics In Books. Also, read the GalleyCat article linked in the BookBaby blog; that article quotes a copyright attorney.

I’m not complaining that I have to cite the work of others; I want to give credit where it’s due. My complaint is that I can’t cite, I have to pay a substantial fee. What’s special about putting a poem to music that makes it different from a non-accompanied poem?

To summarize, the advice I was given as to how to use song lyrics in fiction falls into these categories. These are also laid out in the blog entry, the Galleycat article, and comments on those articles and in the LinkedIn discussion I started.

• Don’t use published song lyrics.
• Write your own songs.
• Reference songs by title. Titles are not covered by copyright law.
• Reference songs obliquely.