This illustration comes from my first draft of All the Birds in...

This illustration comes from my first draft of All the Birds in the Sky,
which I wrote longhand. Laurence has been working on building a
giant robot in his bedroom, while also running away from certain
problems in his life. He doesn’t have room to build a whole giant robot,
so he just builds a single finger, and in the end, he looks at it and
realizes that he’s built “a robot appendage designed only for flipping
off people who deserved it.” Sadly, this did not make it into the final cut of the book. Plus Laurence’s chin got a lot bigger in later drafts, and his acne wasn’t so bad, thank goodness.