What is Despite Our Highs and Lows as Earthlings?

In 2012, I wrote a short story about how one person can be a shockwave through generations of humanity. One death can lead to a dozen new lives, and one life can be split into many deaths. The epicentre of my vision was called Rhys Rhodes and that initial story was about how many people would change if he disappeared. First, it was how his relationships, from his different phases of life, would interact when forced together at his demise: how his ex-wife would feel towards his widow, how the estranged would come back into his family only when he wasn’t there any longer, and how the living would be the ones to bear the full weight of his legacy.

I so enjoyed writing about that life, and that series of events caused by that death, that I kept writing about it. I gave Rhys’ mates their own spheres of influence, I gave his parents entire eras before he even existed, and I gave his kid a life that Rhys would influence more from without than within.

Initially, it was from the third person, but then I started to explore first-person accounts, writing in the personalities of all these characters I had created. I cycled through nearly everyone, from friends to foes, and eventually, I started writing from the perspective of Rhys’ best mate Mort Jones. That was the change that has so far sparked more than 1.5 million words and hundreds of illustrations. It’s the reason I’ve been learning more about art and experimenting with different media and growing my skills as best as I can. When I began to tell Mort’s story, I began to tell a lot of my own.

The project outgrew the boundaries of being able to say “I’m writing a story” very quickly. I never wanted to end anything, I only wanted to explore deeper into the shockwaves. The entire piece became a universe of its own, and, much like the lives it’s describing, has many stories inside of it. Some contain themselves into what I could call short stories, and others are day-in-the-life explorations and memories that don’t solve anything when the sun sets. All of them, though, are about how the discourteous world continues to spin, despite our highs and lows as earthlings.

earthl.ing

There’s no other reason for having a separate domain to contain the archive than because I loved the concept and the name. For all intents and purposes, it’s just an extension of all the things I do here on My Many Muses. It does, however, have a separate e-mail subscription which will only send Transmissions when something new in the universe is put up. This is still where all of the process, progress, and behind-the-scenes will live.

Transmission 001 was released on the 31st of October, 2026, which would be Mort’s 67th birthday. After literal years of saying I couldn’t possibly share it because I didn’t know where to start, I decided to start at the beginning of conscious memory. So, the story goes back in time to 1963, when a three-and-a-half-year-old Mort sees the size of himself against the vast and patient sky above, and tries to decipher his role as an earthling. It is a short, four-part story, which you can read from the beginning by clicking here:

Illustrations

I did quite a few new illustrations for this, and I didn’t use every one of them, but here is a gallery view of the artworks I created for it this month. It was the vast majority of my Artober.

I only made a video of one of the illustrations, and it is the one of Mort and Keti after falling in the mud:

What’s Next?

I do plan to illustrate and publish more of the stories. I was not joking when I said I have more than 1.5 million words written just from Mort’s perspective (that’s about 15 full-length novel’s worth), but I do not plan to stick too closely to chronological order after the main points are explored. Next up, we will flash forward to 1967 when Mort meets Rhys for the very first time. My artwork will likely reflect this as I go through it slowly but surely.