Category: Books

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

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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.

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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.

Yorkshire Rock

Dalesman article

The July Dalesman arrived in this morning’s post and my ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary has a suitably rocky theme, as this year my British Geological Survey paperback, Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, celebrates 25 years in print.

Nature’s Palette

Nature's Palette

It’s that time of year again when I realise that I need to improve my plant drawing so I’ve just started Sarah Simblet’s Botany for the Artist and Nature’s Palette, introduced by Patrick Baty. Nature’s Palette was published last month to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Scottish artist Patrick Syme’s expanded edition of Werner’s Nomencclature of Colours. Syme suggests a system of 110 standard colours in relation to zoology, botany, mineralogy and anatomy which include ‘Siskin Green’, ‘Flax-flower Blue’ and ‘Gallstone Yellow’.

It’s a book that I need to browse through in a good light, to appreciate the difference between ‘Snow White’ and ‘Skimmed-milk White’, ‘Olive/Clove Brown’ and ‘Liver Brown’.

Grids and Margins

page layout
Page layout created in Adobe InDesign

As I’ve mentioned, my approach to page design is normally to cram as much as I can on a double-page spread but after all the books on typography and graphic design that I’ve read recently and (see previous post) the cereal packets that I’ve studied, I’m trying for a calmer, clearer page layout for my Wakefield Women in History.

I’ve just started reading Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time and the classic page layout struck me as being a pleasure to read, so I’ve been using my layout ruler to measure margins, indents and leading (the space between lines) in the handsome hardback, published by Profile Books.

Dolly Pro

Dolly Pro

I’d normally go for a familiar, tried-and-tested, roman typeface like Garamond or Baskerville but an article by typographer Dan Rhatigan on Adobe Creative Cloud persuaded me to try a new ‘warm, fairly classic’ alternative for a book typeface, Dolly Pro, designed by Underware. It looks good to me but the test will be when I print a page on paper.

Irregular Holmes

Holmes

“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.” 

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Henry Lloyd-Hughes‘ Sherlock Holmes in Tom Bidwell’s The Irregulars, appears to have indulged in stronger stimulants than ‘a sandwich and a cup of coffee’ on his journey to ‘violin-land’.

My thanks again to the Netflix team, including costume designer Edward K. Gibbon for the ruffled, threadbare portrait in this week’s Radio Times. The magazine is stuffed with beautifully turned-out, well-scrubbed celebrities, but obviously Holmes after an overdose of his seven-per-cent solution is more appealing to draw with my Lamy Vista and De Atramentis Document Ink.