Fire Feet

From my www.wildyorkshire.co.uk blog, 30th May 2004:

A family gathering means that I meet up with George, aged 7, my great nephew. At a previous family party he and I collaborated on a story, Firefeet. George improvised the story – and for once I was careful not to prompt him, or discuss the plot with him, it was entirely from his own imagination – and I drew the illustrations as the story progressed. George kept the original copy, which was just on a piece of folded scrap paper but I was so haunted by the tale that I wrote it out again from memory, redrew the illustrations, coloured it in Photoshop and printed out a few copies on my colour printer.

George aged 6.
swatches
Swatches used when I coloured my scanned pen drawings for ‘Fire Feet’ (mainly using the paint bucket tool).

The Walking Season

Walks booklets
Heather

It’s a lovely time to get out walking in West Yorkshire and my friend Heather, now living in exile in Staffordshire (which she tells me is also brilliant for walking) has ordered a couple of my walks books for a friend of hers who lives on the fringe of Pontefract’s liquorice country, as featured in my full colour booklet, All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country.

I want the one with the walk from the Chantry Bridge to Featherstone. I think it a splendid walk, and the book will make a lovely present for my friend.

Heather

The Robin Hood booklet, also in full colour, also includes walks around Pontefract and in Brockadale, Wentbridge, where Sayles, a rocky outcrop overlooking the old Great North Road, features in the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballad.

I’m posting these booklets to her friend with a bookmark with a message from Heather and an artist’s impression of Heather on a recent trek she made up a hill.

If you’d like these two booklets, along with a hand-drawn bookmark please use the link below before the end of the month. Please message me via PayPal or e-mail me via the link on my contact page to let me know what you’d like drawing on the bookmark.

Links

Liquorice walks

Two walks booklets: All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country and Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, plus one hand-drawn bookmark, including International Standard postage, £16.00

Rough Patch: postage to Canada

Rough Patch offer

‘. . . earthy through and through. You can feel the garden, the weather, watch the wildlife and smell the seasons through its pages.’

Liz Wright, Smallholder magazine

It’s also a great time to get out in the garden with a sketchbook, so if you’d like a copy of my paperback, Rough Patch (post free, half price but hand-drawn bookmark not included!), please order it via my website:

www.willowisland.co.uk

This booklet has recently proved popular with garden journalers and I’ve had an enquiry from Canada. If you’d like me to post a copy to you in Canada, please use the link below before the end of this month.

Rough Patch, plus International Standard postage to Canada:

Scrivener Novel Format

Scrivener chapters

Just 530 words so far but although I haven’t made much progress on the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in November it has given me the opportunity to dip into the novel writing format of Scrivener, a program that I’ve used for writing articles for years.

Chapters

The Novel Format includes folders for two blank chapters, which you can easily adapt and add to.

Each chapter can be divided into scenes. As an illustrator I tend to think in scenes rather than in chunks of dialogue, so I like the visual approach of the corkboard view where I can see the files and, if necessary, rearrange their order. Each scene can have an image attached to it.

Characters

Scrivener characters

There are folders too for characters, locations and research plus, one of my favourite Scrivener writing tools, the Name Generator. My characters Clark Rafferty and Vanda Redman were the first names to pop up on the suggestions for male and female names. For Len Platter – the disaster prone TV chef, star of the ill-fated Platter’s Oven-Ready Deal, I had to scroll down the list a bit. But Len Platter sounds about right for a character who’s attempting to follow in the footsteps of ‘backstreet mechanic’ Fred Dibnah and ‘gastronaut’ Keith Floyd.

character notes

Each character gets a character sketch sheet.

Writing Mode

writing in Scrivener

When you’re writing you’ve got the choice of keeping an eye on the overall structure of your novel or going for a clutter-free Composition Mode.

If you finish your novel, which I won’t, Scrivener can:

generate a document in the standard manuscript format for novels. Settings are also provided to make it easy to compile to a paperback-style PDF for self-publishing or an EPUB or Kindle ebook.

Scrivener, notes on Novel Format

If I do get around to writing another book it’s likely to be non-fiction rather than a blockbuster novel but there’s also an option for a standard non-fiction template . . . plus templates for theses, screenplays, poems and stage plays.

Link

Scrivener – Literature and Latte

Burnt Books

sketches

It might be 50 years ago since Bill’s homemade stereo spontaneously combusted, singeing my books and diaries on the shelf above but, as he’s my brother I’ve never let him forget it!

I still remember the thrill of first hearing familiar records in stereo for the first time. The track I particularly remember was ‘The Shirt Event from Olympia’ by the Bonzo Dog Band. Going from mono to stereo was the equivalent of switching from 2D to 3D. The surprise was that we could tap into this sophisticated technology with Bill’s concoction of bits of old amps from a record player and radio wired together and held in place with tacks hammered into an offcut of plywood. Initially the speakers weren’t even in boxes, they were just lying there on the floor next to makeshift amplifier.

We now know that attaching a transformer to a piece of wood isn’t a good idea.

charred book

Here’s just one of the casualties amongst our treasured records, books and diaries on the metal shelf unit above. I got our local printer Mr Chappell to trim off the worst of the charred edges from my copy of Coyler & Hammond’s Flies of the British Isles. Still readable but hardly a pleasure to use, so naturally when I spotted a pristine copy amongst the secondhand books in the cafe at the National Trust’s Wentworth Castle I went for it.

Nor could I resist Guide to Microlife by Rainis and Russell, Animals under logs and stones by Wheater and Read and Small Freshwater Creatures by Olsen, Sunesen and Pedersen.

Novel in November

Ocean

I’ve never done Inktober because it’s too near to real life for me but when I heard about NaNoWriMo – a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November, I couldn’t resist it. It’s free to sign up, if you want to give it a go.

NaNoWriMo page

As you can see from my project page I’ve so far written zero words, but at least I’ve designed a cover.

Ocean book cover

Here’s my summary:

Looking out on the ocean. Currents in our lives and eddies in history. And a bit of marine biology. I love marine biology. Returning tides, a secret garden surrounded by blank walls and blocked doorways . . . and redemption. Just say if you think If’m being too ambitious!

And an extract, difficult to choose an extract when I haven’t started writing it yet, but this was a quote from a recent conversation:

“I used to dive but now I have an irrational fear of the sea. I know where all of the fish live and what they can do to me. If there’s a strip of grass at the top of the beach I can sit there, but I can’t go on the beach.”

Well, it’s a start . . . only 49,950 words to go.

Link

NaNoWriMo 22

Published
Categorized as Books

The Gissing House

Gissing house

The George Gissing Centre, in Thompson’s Yard off the top of Westgate, opened its doors for yesterday’s Wakefield Art Walk. This was Victorian novelist George Gissing’s childhood home. His father, Thomas Gissing was a pharmacist who wrote Ferns and Fern Allies of Wakefield.

Wakefield authors display

There’s currently an exhibition of Wakefield authors at the centre in the form of a timeline, starting with ‘the Wakefield Master’, author of the town’s Medieval Mystery Plays and finishing up with Joanne Harris, Lisa Bradley and I, so I’m in good company.

Wakefield authors dispaly

Link

The Gissing Trust on the Wakefield Historical Society website

Books by Wakefield authors at the Gissing Centre

Around Old Ossett

Around Old Ossett

I’d normally settle down to a session on InDesign on a rainy day but it’s a heatwave keeping us grounded today. In the transfer from my old defunct PC to my iMac, I’m taking advantage of it being easier in InDesign to take images across the gutter.

I’m pleased with how the vectorised place name cartoons have reproduced, slightly simplified into blocks of solid colour, like little woodcuts.

Link

Around Old Ossett at Willow Island Editions, £2.95, post free in the U.K.

Shelf Space

old books

It’s got to the stage where, if I’m buying a new book, I let an old one go. It’s difficult because even the ones that I’m not going to read again usually have some kind of story behind them.

Published
Categorized as Books

Deep in the Wood

Deep in the Wood

This children’s book, first published in 1987 by Heinemann, was inspired by us moving down to Coxley Valley a few years earlier.

At this time of year, the wood and meadow have taken on the early autumnal look that sets the mood for the story, such as it is: it’s a walk through the wood looking at the way birds and animals use sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.

I included butterflies tasting through their feet and bees seeing ultra-violet but my spread of a pipistrelle bat using echo location turned out looking a bit too technical to sit comfortably with the other spreads.

Bromeliad

bromeliad

From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.

student sketchbook, 1973
Page from my winter 1973 sketchbook.

These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.

house plants

Town Gardening

I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.

Town Gardening and my sketchbook
Town Gardening

Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.

In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.

So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.

Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.

dedidcation
The book had evidently been on the shelf in the bookshop since pre-decimalisation days and it includes this dedication on the front endpaper.