They look like burrowing owls…

Stink Bug Saturday. It’s become a regular thing on this blog. I write a chapter every week to continue the story that started with a silly photo of a stink bug in my home office quite literally blocking my escape.

I started writing a story to go with it. It was fun. The story has gone off in a different direction that I had expected it to go. The stink bug is gone now. For the moment anyway. Maybe.

The story is a prime example of the ‘pantsing’ style of writing. I’m writing by the seat of my pants. I have no idea what the next chapter will bring or what’s going to happen next until I sit down and write it. There’s not forethought, no long-term plan.

In the process, it’s been revealed that the stink bug isn’t a real bug after all. Our main character (the story is written in the first person), is a middle-aged, overweight accountant named Nate. When he first sees the stink bug for what it really is, he laughs because it looks like a burrowing owl with an extra set of arms.

Well not quite, but close.

Back, many years ago, when I was in high school (and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth), I made it a hobby of creating new sentient vertebrate species. They were typically things like “an intelligent cheetah” or “a bipedal horse-person.” The snake-men were among my favorites. They just wound up being cute. Geez, I ought to post some of the old drawings I did. I have folders and folders of them.

One of the myriad of critters I came up with were the bird-men. They actually have a name that I came up with back then, but in retrospect, it’s a really lame name, so I’m trying to come up with something better. You can make suggestions in the comments below.

Anyway, given my deep and abiding interest in vertebrate anatomy, whatever creature I came up with had to be anatomically ‘functional.’ Of course, what I knew about vertebrate anatomy was all self-taught, so there were some – er – problems. Now, with my more thorough knowledge of vertebrate anatomy and evolution, the beasties are more realistic (though still probably highly unlikely).

Since the bird-men came back in the stink bug story, I started messing with their anatomy again. I might have caught myself doing a few sketches during a department seminar.

Obviously, I needed to do a little research. I wandered around the building and took some photos of a crow skeleton that was in one of the biology department’s cases. Very helpful!

I also jumped on-line and found a nice photograph of an eagle skeleton. Given that my bird-man beasts are predators, I wanted to study the skeleton of an avian raptor.

I also spent a little time looking at reconstructions of Archaeopteryx and Velociraptor, because I wanted to give the bird-men a long tail.

I sat down and did a few more sketches of the skeleton, and began to flesh them out.

I attempted a sketch of the beast in profile.

The more difficult aspect to draw is the oblique view. I don’t think I was entirely successful.

I need to make some clay models of the animal and/or its skeleton so that I can get a better sense of how the arms would hang. In my mind, it all makes sense, but I can’t transpose it to paper.

The good news is that despite the fact that I can’t draw the beast (its arms anyway), I have a much clearer image of what the bird-men look like so that I can continue with my writing.

I still don’t have a name for them though. I’m open to suggestions. What might they call themselves? Something that a mockingbird or parrot might be able to say? They’re birds, after all.

If you’re interested in the stink bug story, it begins here, with Chapter 1.