It’s been a busy couple of days (mainly with editing, although I did also get to go to the Scottish Children’s Book Awards yesterday – more on that in my article on The Edinburgh Reporter) so I’ve done a couple of mixed media doohickies.
Continue reading “28 Drawings Later – Days 23 and 24”
I can’t quite seem to get into a habit of posting every day (methinks the book editing is to blame), but so far I’ve managed to keep up with the 28 Drawings Challenge without causing myself undue stress. Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about witches, because like all good fairy stories East of the Sun and West of the Moon incorporates a few of them.
There is also a horrible troll princess with a really long nose, so I drew a page of noses, thus: Continue reading “28 Drawings Later – Days 20, 21 and 22”
I tried to post this yesterday but our internet wasn’t having any of it so I gave up and watched Under Siege 2 instead. I had a fairly busy weekend so just did a few quick doodles focusing on things the young girl is given by three random old ladies to help with her quest to find the prince in the castle.
The gifts are slightly unusual – a bit like when your granny starts to lose it a bit and gives you things where you’re like ‘wow, what a lovely… what is that?’ One is a spinning wheel, which seems like it would be slightly unwieldy, or at least my one is as it’s a full size one with foot pedals. Presumably there are more portable versions which I will discover as my research progresses further.
Then we have some more carding combs. You may remember the other day I did a golden hair comb, without actually referring back to the text of the story, only to discover that the gift wasn’t a hair comb at all but the kind used for getting icky bits out of sheep’s wool when you’re going to spin it into thread. This makes sense in the context of the spinning wheel, but it’s not the most magical looking item… nowadays the things used for carding are a bit like giant hair brushes, but I managed to find a couple of more old fashioned looking ones to sketch.
I think this is the style I’ll probably use in the event I develop any of these into something approximating promotional materials for the play. It’s not that dissimilar to the hair comb, but I think it’s a nice shape and probably easier to stick in the pocket of a raggedy dress than some of the others.
And lo, it was February, and the never-ending task of editing the 12 books I wrote across the 12 months of 2011 began in earnest.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure where to start with this. Some people might choose the beginning, but frankly I didn’t wanna. I could lie and tell you this is because I’ve read so many articles saying starting at the beginning is narrative suicide, but (as I mentioned at the beginning of this sentence) that would be a lie.
It’s actually something of a practical issue. I’ve lost around an hour a day to the 28 Drawings Later challenge this month, so in editorial terms I wanted something I could go back to and just edit. However, the first book I wrote last year, Caligula’s Blog, deserves a lot more research than I managed to do at the time, which means I can’t just jump straight back in. Well maybe I could, but as discussed, I don’t want to. I want to be able to take a few hours at a time to get really immersed in the history of it so that I go back with as accurate a timeline as possible and much more in-depth knowledge of the period.
So, the beginning turns out not to be a great place for me to start. However, help is at hand in the form of a couple of competitions – The Dundee International Book Prize, which I mentioned in a post last month, and The Kelpies Prize.
Continue reading “Editing, and a request for readers…”
A few weeks back I posted a link to 12 Novels in 12 Months, my writing twin from Canada who started her project last June… and now another 12 book writer has popped up in Utah! Michelle started in January and you can find her at 12novels.com. I think we might have to found some kind of club.
There is also a 12 books project going on in Wisconsin, although this one is a little different than ours. Writer/game designer Matt Forbeck is writing four trilogies this year and he crowd sourced actual money to help him do it. Why didn’t I think of that back in December 2010…
All of this goes to show that it was clearly an excellent idea, because great minds think alike. Or, as my friend claims they would say in Germany, ‘two idiots, one thought’. And it means you are spoiled for choice in terms of reading the ongoing adventures of people who haven’t finished their novelling yet. How many people across the world will do this in 2013? Lots, probably.
One of the main characters in East of the Sun and West of the Moon (a fairytale which is my chosen theme for this month’s 28 Drawings Later challenge, new people) is The White Bear. So I thought I would draw him. In doing this I came across lots of adorable pictures of baby polar bears and nearly died of a cuteness overload. And then my friend posted a picture of her newborn baby on facebook and I literally did die of a cuteness overload. If you take the word ‘literally’ to mean ‘not literally’, which I understand is the way the kidz use it these days. Curse you, society. I’m now feeling quite broody, and plan to go out and obtain myself a baby human and a baby polar bear, not necessarily in that order. Still, I figure they’ll look out for one another rather than fighting if we introduce them to each other early enough.
Anyway, here’s my drawing of a bear.
12 Books in 12 Months 