A fanzine editor I respect asked me for an illustration, but I was buggered if I knew how to do it! The story that needed illustration was about an old friend who had passed away, and the narrator who was reliving old memories. Then he switched gears in a rather jarring fashion, and began to look forward to many years of future memories with his other fan friends. The rest of the story appeared to switch moods back and forth. My first thought was that this was overwritten as well as the writer being unable to make up his mind. That's when I discovered that the story had been written in the 1970s, and the author was actually putting his fledgling fiction up for criticism ... if not actual ridicule! Once I understood that, I understood why the writing was so bad. But it didn't solve my problem about the illustration. Bad writing is not apt to make for better illustration! My first sketch was a stinker, in keeping with the inspiration. Fortunately, I came up with something more successful the next day, when I produced this sketch.