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Background - El Viento

The website io9.com (before they were folded into Gizmodo) used to have probably the single best recurring feature that made me want to go back to the site on a regular basis.  They would take pieces of art from artists who they found on various sites and use those pieces as the basis for a writing prompt.  Aspiring writers would put the pieces in the comments.  By this point, courtesy of the godawful Kinja platform, a lot of those posts are no longer easily available, and the art pieces which inspired them are no longer viewable.

The image which inspired this piece had a cowboy looking up at a trio of warriors formed out of storm clouds.  For some reason, I thought of the cowboy poet Baxter Black, and the often irreverent tone a lot of his work carries.  This particular piece is rough and sloppy, but I liked it enough that I wanted to save it before Kinja lost it.

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