Several months ago, novelist, comedian, poet, storyteller, and president of Write Bloody Publishing, Derrick Brown wrote me with a plan. A friend of his was redesigning a huge building in a small town and wanted to turn it into a collection of shops designed by different creators. He wanted Derrick to dream big and design a bookstore.
Derrick told me his plan for Fascination Station. It was to be a train station, with a checkout counter modeled after Grand Central stations information kiosk. It would have cubby holes for reading, set into in the back wall designed like bunks on a train car. Large displays would be inset in arches showing landscapes rolling by. Travel posters advertising departure times for famous fictional destinations would hang on one wall, and shelves would roll away, so folding chairs could pull out from a secret compartment and an audience could watch authors read from the back of a full size caboose, as if they were on a whistle-stop tour.
It sounded wonderful, and Derrick wanted me to draw it.
While I make detailed 3D models for my comics, I’d never designed something like this. Something that was to become an actual physical place. Something that needed to fit in exact dimensions and be usable by flesh and blood people. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and the illustration came together in no time.
Sadly, things fell through. The Fascination Station only exists in these drawings.
But gosh does it make me want to go to a bookstore. So I think I will.
Two weeks ago, I returned home from visiting family in Canada. They’d given me a check for inheritance my aunt had left me.
