Dealing with the fallout of black friday (plus some extra circumstantial trashfire that all piled up in the last few days) I spent a week being all but unable to draw and not even wanting to do so, a situation I've encountered last year as well and which caused me the same grief (although I did solve it in a way that I found very pleasant, it was when I paid artists to color some of my sketches, remember? Wasn't that lovely?). I sketched many things and hate all of them. Yet I must, I have obligations and generally speaking it's one of the few things I like to do. But just a day off and I manage to finish something, it's not much but still that felt good

A boy wandered into the swamps and found himself lost, so he tried to follow the bells. They were faint enough that he instead found himself facing Marty-ling-ling, shaking his head left and right to make the carillon under his chin jingle.
“Where to?” Marty-ling-ling asked, pausing for a moment.
“Home,” the boy responded.

What follows varies greatly between the many variants of the folk tale, and one cannot help but wonder how it came to be that the same entity can be said by some to lead lost travelers safely out of the swamps, and by others to deliberately lead them into places where they inevitably drown. The theory goes that like other such garden-variety demons, this entity was a way to cope with something more terrifying than evil : the utter neutrality of the swamps.