The Dreaming has turned out to be one amazing book. The atmosphere Queenie Chan creates, through both her art and her storytelling, is about as rich and effective as I've seen in any suspense-horror manga.

I was beyond myself. It was as if no one else in the restaurant existed,

To have him do something so special, so out of the ordinary, was breathtaking. I could see he had taken a lot of time to get it from heart and head to paper. There's nothing that can take that away. He went another level for me.

Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.

BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

I came to a sketch where the space between my arm and Greta’s arm, the shape of the place between us, had been darkened in. The negative space. That’s what Finn called it. He was always trying to get me to understand negative space. And I did. I could understand what he was saying, but it didn’t come naturally to me. I had to be reminded to look for it. To see the stuff that’s there but not there. In this sketch, Finn had colored in the negative space, and I saw that it made a shape that looked like a dog’s head. Or, no—of course, it was a wolf’s head, tilted up, mouth open and howling. It wasn’t obvious or anything. Negative space was kind of like constellations. The kind of thing that had to be brought to your attention. But the way Finn did it was so skillful. It was all in the way Greta’s sleeve draped and the way my shoulder angled in. So perfect. It was almost painful to look at that negative space, because it was so smart. So exactly the kind of thing Finn would think of. I touched my finger to the rough pencil lines, and I wished I could let Finn know that I saw what he’d done. That I knew he’d put that secret animal right between Greta and me.