Like a fingerprint, but different

Yo. I made two small animagraphs for you this week.

The first is a web app, and the second is the winning story from last month's poll.

I'll explain that obviously made-up word in a few moments, but since the first animagraph is a reading app specifically, I'll give you that part first.

It's called Press to Continue, and the idea came to me earlier this month when I was thinking about how it can feel hard to focus on a page of text, but it feels easy to read much more in a game without even realizing it.

You go to the site and paste text into a box, and it lets you read it line by line like dialog in a video game.

You can use it on this newsletter, if you'd like. Just remember you'll have to come back to vote.

As far as animagraphy goes, it's a word I came up with earlier this week. It's been a busy week.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it, as I just built it out of Latin and Greek: the Latin anima for soul, and the Greek graph for writing or recording. The fully Greek psychography was already taken, and we have no problem tangling etymological roots in this house. Animascript is also cool, I guess; maybe soulprint or soulstamp are more accessible.

But I digress.

Animagraphy is, in my imagining, an imprint of the soul. It doesn't have to be a spiritual soul: core, essence, or oddly inhabited piecemoment of spacetime all work just as well.

Making art? Animagraphy. Carefully crafted text message? Animagraphy. Helping a caterpillar cross a busy street, or refusing to get up so that your lap-invading cat can feel safe and loved a few moments longer? Animagraphy.

Every tiny little butterfly effect that radiates out from you: animagraphy.

Now before we get to my second animagraph, I'll give you the chance to express your anima through vote. Since we're at the end of the northern winter months, I've decided to celebrate our first three months of stories with the Bloomside B-Side Brawl . . . side. A three-way vote between the first three story seeds to pass us by.

Here's a refresher.

From What the well holds:

Something shone down there, brighter than anything she could readily explain.

From Cabin fever for a coward:

This was it: the last sound he was ever going to hear was the tireless rattle of an off-kilter bathroom fan.

And from An intruder of class:

The upstairs window was obscured with steam, the front door was unlocked, and he could just make out the sounds of one of his Charlie Parker vinyls—someone was in his home.

Voting runs through the 11th, and if you voted last month, you'll get a reminder on the 10th if you haven't voted yet. New subscribers will find the poll in their welcome email.

Now, my final animagraph for February.

Waiting for the sun

All they could hear were geese; all they could smell was wisteria. It was a pretty day for an ugly plot, and Jessica and Jabari Jacobs could barely keep their stomachs settled as they sprinted into the wind.

A storm was coming in from the west, one darkness to meet another where the sun should have been.

"Jessica Jacobs," Jabari panted out as he stopped to rest his hands on his legs, ". . . my heart . . ."

Jessica yelled back over her shoulder, not bothering to slow her pace at all, dress dragging over the nascent mud. "Heart or lungs, Jabari, which will you listen to? And we don't have to say Jacobs anymore!"

Jabari paused for a moment and looked over his shoulder at a blackened eastern sky, punctuated only by bursts of flaring oranges below.

There were still dozens of geese loudly charting the same course they were overhead, too persistent a creature to worry about getting a little tired. The sounds of home were fortunately too far to compete from here, as were the smells of burning wood as the wind brought the blooming woods to replace them.

Jessica looked back again to find Jabari had not yet decided which of his vital organs were the least vital and stopped. "Okay, we'll pause. But only because we left first. And you can't say Jacobs again or I'm leaving you behind." She walked back to sit on the ground next to Jabari and began pulling at the skirt of her dress, looking for a weakness to tear through. "Do you have anything sharper than fingernails?"

"Yes. Here." Jabari dug through the right pocket of his borrowed dress pants, a few inches too short for him, and conjured a fork. "I got it from a table on the way out."

"One: a fork? Why? Two: no wonder you're not having a good time running, Jabari." She jammed the tines into a band of decorative fabric circling her dress and began to separate the bottom half. "It looks like running will be a lot more comfortable for both of us in a second, so you get that heart rate back down. The forest is long, and we still need to find who we can."

He looked at the tattered, white band of dress now fluttering on the ground and beginning to collect raindrops. "It's nothing personal, though, right?"

"If it were, I could have just left you, couldn't I have?" She pushed herself back up to her feet. "Let's go. I still can't see anyone from the council or the mayor's office, so we can keep it to a jog until you're ready, okay?"

"Do you think he'll make it out? Find us?"

"Mayor Jacob Soot will meet his poetry, or I'm coming back here with whomever I can find anyway. I told you, Jabari: Jacobs no more. None of us."

That's it for February. Now go take that soul of yours and stamp it on something.

Martin

P.S.:

What's your favorite form of animagraphy? What lines have you sent rippling through the universe in your wake?

Yes, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my mid-thirties, if you can't tell.