Part 2: Dada Poetry

McCloud said the best way to accomplish the feat was to enter the 24 hours with no thought having been given to story ideas or characters prior. Somehow I did this, and that made it all the more frightening at first. I had a couple of random books laid before me, and my intention was to flip to random pages of those books and let my fingers do the walking to random words and phrases and see if they don't trigger something in me.

They did soon enough - the character I began to doodle reminded me of another book of mine, a tiny pamphlet I'd paid $1.50 for at the gift shop in the Albuquerque airport the previous year. I'd purchased it because I thought there was a story to tell in it somewhere, but I hadn't ever made the time to extract this story from it, one of countless story kernels in my head I'd never given justice to. Now there was no putting off my finding the story hidden there.

 
Part 6: Inky fingers last all summer long
Part 7: Now I know what it means.
Part 8: Photo Gallery
         

Never washed his hair»
This line of description from Poppy Z. Brite made me think of some grungy guy with greasy hair sticking up all over.

I found the words Bus Station on some page and it brought to mind a situation where you're waiting, helplessly for the bus, something I'm not alone in having gone through as a child. My grungy guy would be in that predicament.

The words Analyzing «Artifacts caught my eye in a Museum of Natural History brochure that happened to be lying around that day. That as much as anything made me think of "Rock Art Symbols of the Southwest" and it suddenly my grungy character had found an artifact. There were also three donars to the museum named Charles, Allison and Stephen. And the Seminars mentioned in the brochure gave us the geeky thing Charlie and Allison bonded over.