Bird People, or Beople,

Just kidding.

Imagine if that's what they were called though.

Nice.

Well, what's basically happened here is that I got bored of my attempts to draw a Sylvestus thing, and I drew a Dying Ember thing instead. It's something I've wanted to draw for a while, but that never ended up being what I did draw on the occasions I've taken to my sketchbook recently. My brain has been in such a Sylvestus place for a while, sometimes it's hard to remember I have another, pre-existing novel.

It ended up being some wonderful comments by another author slash writey-friend, Claire Laminen, which triggered my switch in subject material.

Click to enlarge

I'm pleased and vaguely surprised with how it turned out. It was also extremely fun to draw. I think I just really like wings.

There's two sparrowhawks in there, two falcons, some buzzards, an osprey, two kites, and a barn owl. I looked at some eagles and vultures but by that point I only had the tiny right bottom corner left and I... Couldn't be bothered. The ones on there are pretty enough.

I've been wanting to talk about something like this for a while, and I think this has made itself the perfect opportunity. There's also gonna' be a metaphor in there. Advanced, I know.

Since even before I started to write Dying Ember, I've been fascinated by the potential physiology of bird-humans. Maybe just humans with wings, but how much further could you take it? The conventional perspectives in literature which includes humans and bird wings are either evil biological experiment to implant the wings onto living people, or supernatural or magical creatures which therefore don't have to abide by such petty things as physics. There was a big surge in the late 2000s shooting down the impossibility of winged people, and although I barely understood all the big words like torsion angle and body mass ratio at the time, the fascination of how to solve all those problems stayed with me.

In 2014, I drew a conceptual piece trying to determine a suitable bone structure and organ system for bird-people.

To this day I'm still proud of it, and stick with what I drew here in terms of the shoulder structure and, to some degree, organs. Birds and mammals have completely different respiration systems, but also hormonal glands and chest shapes and spines and hips... Combining the two was intriguing and fun.

What I drew yesterday was much easier, and much faster (about two and a half hours, compared to the fifteen or so I think on the 2014 piece) but, to me, just as important.

As the eagle-eyed (eyyy i'm sorry) may have noticed, in yesterday's piece, all of the people have tails as well as wings. In all earlier artwork, they do not. I'd been considering adding tails to them for physics reasons for a long time, but the image just didn't work in my head - I quite like the effect it has in these in-flight drawings, but I have tried to draw tails on them before, and to visualise them while writing, and it just... Didn't work. But the thing is, they would definitely need tails for control, balance, slowing, acceleration, and... Well. Being able to fly. Drawing all of the different poses above really clarified that for me, especially working out how the tails would have to contract, expand, raise, and lower to direct their bodies in different directions.

The story I run with is that instead of reptiles evolving feathers for insulation and display, then using them to glide and eventually fly, it was early primates. Therefore, all Earth's evolutionary history shifted so that winged humans, rather than birds, ruled the skies. And only birds of prey, because Cannibalism is Bad and I'm less intrigued by pigeon-people (if it makes you happy to have pigeon-people in your mind's version of Dying Ember, though, go ahead. They're all yours).

But there's a reason reptiles developed into birds, not mammals (excluding that it might just have been chance). Birds' lungs are controlled by the same muscles as their wings, just like reptiles' limbs are, so their respiratory system is different. Their digestive systems, while varied between the raptor taxa, are largely more adapted to be able to store food in a place that it won't affect their ability to fly, before gradually being digested in multiple chambers. In the 2014 drawing I did something toward reconciling this with the mammal digestive system, but they're different enough that there isn't really a reasonable middle ground. The Long-Wings in the novel are described as being on average slightly smaller than Short- or Broad-Wings, but in actuality anything larger than a real modern-day gyrfalcon just wouldn't be able to achieve the speed and agility described of Dany and the other Longs (and the biggest people would have to be about three and a half foot tall, the size of the largest modern day flying raptor, the Andean condor). Plus, the more you look into it, the more it kind of... Falls apart. I draw and visualise the characters of Dying Ember with bulky double-shoulders - the wing-joints just above where we have our arm-joints, and their arm-joints below those. In reality, having arms at all would just add a whole host of extra problems that would probably result in some very unattractive and complex solutions. The heads on some of the drawings above were ungainly and difficult to draw; raptors' heads are that shape for a reason, and I think to look forward while they fly the characters would get some damn sore necks, unless they had incredibly long and flexible necks that could bend back and forth at will. Oh, and their legs would probably have to have short thighs and calves and ankles of equal length to tuck well into their bodies...

The reason raptors are the way they were is evolution and physiology. The more you go into it and pick holes in bird-people, the more you try and solve, the more you just end up with...

Birds.

So if you don't want to visualise Kiah and North and Dany and co. as being three foot tall with weird vulture necks and tails and monstrous body-builder chests and flamingo legs, constantly vomiting up their meals to try and re-digest them... It's okay, dude. Just picture them how you want.

It's fiction. We can have fun and investigate the possibilities and play around with physics and biochemistry, but in the end their universe has a fundamental difference to ours, and whatever the details of that difference, the outcome is this: bird-people work.

I do a similar thing with Dying Ember. And with Sylvestus, and that's not even published yet.

You want it to be 100% perfect before it sees the light of day, but the truth is that it will never be 100% perfect. You just have to draw a line when you're satisfied enough, and publish that.

And then you spot more things after the line. Like that they aren't actually biologically possible. Or that there are types of raptor that aren't Short-, Long-, or Broad-Winged (kites - red, black, Brahminy, all of 'em - are some of my favourite birds, especially to watch in the air, but they don't come under this very simplified classification. Owls are completely different anatomically, and varied within themselves. Clay is a Broad and an osprey, but ospreys aren't actually broad-winged in the same way as eagles or buzzards. It goes on).

Or that a minor character has two surnames that are mentioned at different points and no-one spotted it and now she's just out there changing her surname halfway through the novel and please, let no-one else notice this now that I've said it...

There are plot holes in Harry Potter, and The Raven Cycle, and Game of Thrones (well, season 7 at least. still loved it tho. theon my boyyy). There are typos. There are mistakes.

Do what you can. Draw a line in the substrate of your choice. Put it in the light of day. Every time you change the lighting or move to a different angle or leave it alone and go back to it you'll see more flaws, but you know what?

It's not real.

Take a breath. Draw some bird-people with tails even though they don't have tails in the novel.

Have fun.

How you, too, can feel when you let go of your inhibitions and Just Enjoy the Fiction