Eureka! New Idea: Moon Lanterns

I'm over the moon on this one, Gang. I've had two top-drawer ideas for Halfland today. Both are sketched, and I couldn't resist posting one of them before bed.

I had been planning for there to be handmade paper lanterns hanging on the lower branches of the Answer Tree but I never knew before what they should look like. Rustic, yes, and beautiful, as one of the main characters, Yanu, the Moth Man, would be living in the tree on the branches above the lanterns (because we all know how moths feel about light at night, they stay close by.)

But it wasn't until today when I remembered a poem I wrote last year about how the moon looked like welcoming light on a neighbor's porch. I picked up and explored a small paper lantern that I had painted black for Halloween with new eyes. Dots began connecting in my mind and the next thing I knew, I had an element for Halfland that I dearly love.

The main lantern, lit each night by Rana and hung from her porch, will be meant to actually be the moon in all its phases. Every exterior scene in the evening will show the lantern in a different phases of the moon, as I see it each evening from my own window.

It's as if Rana's cottage, with its Answer Tree that knows everything in life, and shall I call it the Stream of Consciousness with its rocks that are aware that runs along side it, and now the moon displayed each night from its porch, becomes grander metaphor than I imagined yet still completely meaningful to me privately. As it should be.

Next Post: I can show how the Time Flys operate the clock in the Time Frog's belly when he eats them! Another improbable connect-the-dots tale with a very happy ending...