I’m about to commit map¹. I’ve been deliberately trying to hold it all in my head to avoid the mistake of not leaving myself enough room to play with in future, or the temptation of join-the-dots quest plotting. But I need to work some things out about the layout of the University that nothing short of scribbling them down will do. It’s just enough different from what you’d get by mashing a few Cambridge colleges together that my mental model is having trouble holding together.

It’s not cat-vaccuuming. (Although blogging about it may be.) Thinking about it has already cleared one bit of awkward plot for me (I just needed to change which side of the river the back porters’ lodge is on). I’m hoping to post some new content after Easter.

¹I’ve known people self-deprecatingly, or perhaps publishing-industry-deprecatingly, refer to themselves as “committing trilogy”.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but the work in progress is conceived of as five (or so) largely self-contained sections whose background events come together to form an overall story. The five parts I had ready formed the first section. I’ve just put up the final part, so you can now read the whole thing. (Although of course you get the parts presented in reverse order.)

I’ve almost got the first part of the second section ready, so that could go up next week. How long it will be before the next update is anybody’s guess, though. My instinct is to make use of this natural break to build up some more material (and give me some time to work out what this section is called). I said 3000 words a week was a high target, and what I’ve managed is more like 2000 in eight weeks. Even skipping three updates (two through being ill, one through having something else to say) hasn’t bought me the time needed. So: it might have helped me unblock, but progress is still slow. It could be a long while before you get to fin dout what happens next.

I have my fingers in three creative pies. Or maybe my feet in three creative camps. I’ve already talked about photogrpahy, which is where I think I have the talent; and writing, which I feel compelled to attempt. The third leg is music, and that’s the one I really enjoy. The Blue String Pudding reunion reminded me just how just how good it feels to be making music with other people (the most fun you can have with a group of at least three people?). Sometimes, in this breed of music, I feel being at the keyboard can be something of a cheat. With the right patch, I can provide a contribution essentially no-handed (but two-footed). But it still feels good. There aren’t many fields of creative endeavour, I think, where collaboration adds so much to the experience of artist or audience, except possibly acting, and music has the advantage that a band can be as good as, or even better than, its best member, while a cast will be limited by its weakest. I might not be much of musician, but by hooking up with people like Steve (lead) and Jeremy (drums, and it was noticable how much we missed him at the reunion) I can be part of producing something better than I could on my own.

(No update to the fiction this week: you’ve got something else from me, and it gives me an extra week to try and get part 6 written.)

Inspired by two things. Firstly, Kaet’s “Drawing a week” as an attempt to put something behind the effort to get unblocked and just write. Secondly, I’ve now posted two witters about this stuff in rather abstract terms and Ingi has pointed out that it’s very difficult to comment on what I’m doing without something more concrete. So. Over at my WordPress blog I’ll be posting 3000–4000 words’ worth a week, starting from today. I’ve got five parts ready to go, so that gives me a month to start trying to get ahead of the curve. Now, 3000 words a week is probably going to be pushing me, so I expect it to slow down once I’ve caught up. Or I might stop, if everyone says “Why are you bothering?” But some kind of schedule might impose the discipline I need.

Yeah, I know the names are crap. That can be sorted out later.

Update: Now up, part 2. In which not a great deal happens.

Update: Now up, part 3. In which the plot thickens.

Update: Now up, rather delayed by music and illness, part 4. In which matters come to a head.

I actually wrote something this evening.

See, there is a section I’d skipped ahead to writing. I think of it as the hinge of the story—it’s the point where everything changes as three revelations pile in on top of each other.

Except … I’m not sure I’ve got them in the right order. The first is fixed, but hot on its heels come two pieces of news from half way across the continent. One is a political situation spiralling towards civil war—it shouldn’t have an impact on the protagonist, half a continent away and in a very different country, but by the end of the story it most profoundly will have done so. The other, the bearer of the news doesn’t initially believe—half-forgotten monsters from the past have returned to stalk the land. This is something which could end up having the kind of impact on the continent of the black death hitting Europe. It’s also going to have an impact on the protagonist—he already knows this has happened, and has been enjoined to secrecy—but within the arc of this story it’s a rather incidental one. It’s more of a set up for what I know happens afterwards.

Originally, I wrote the delivery of these two pieces the other way round. And I’ve just realised that the result is “OMG, it’s the end of the world! And to make things worse, this distant country is about to break out in a civil war which won’t touch us!” I’m not sure I could write a finer example of bathos if I tried. Plus which, it over-telegraphs which is the more important to the story. So I’ve just rewritten it the other way round. I think the result is more natural, and improves the story telling. Although I’m willing to be told otherwise. And, while it was largely a pile of cut-and-paste, it means I’m writing again.

I’m trying to do a drawing a week with GIMP and the graphics pad, to try to develop some technique therein. Even if to start it’s just some naff scribbles: the only way is up, .

I’ve got a thing, at the moment, for kind of putting the mythical and romantic (in the romantci movement sense) into civil engineering, and for magic realism, and the like. So expect a few things along those lines. After finishing the Weston Hills Tunnels picture, I’m starting on one where a dragon is hanged on a gibbet at a (slightly modified) Filton Roundabout in Bristol. There are good pictures of Filton on the web, and it’s a reassuringly prosaic roundabout. The dragon is based on the D&D black dragon, except it’s now red and yellow, like fruit salads, . I’ve only done half an hourish of a rough scribble so far, but it’s probably enough to give people the idea. I wish I’d done more roleplay-ey stype stuff as a kid now: I get the impression that most sixteen year old geeks can draw dragons in thirty seconds flat, it’s the first time I’ve tried, and I’m not sure where all the bits go, .

I really do feel like a duck out of water, here, drawing rather than writing. But it’s always good to stretch yourself, I guess.

I should have this one finished by about this time next week, if I want to stick to plan,

Update 1 week later: Okay, so the plan was more, um, aspirational. Last scribble before I draw it proper. I thought the previous one was too much thing in landscape so I’ve added loads of street furniture and stuff going on, also sorted out the perspective (a bit), as well as general tidying. Picture is kind of depressing which I guess is good, because it means it’s at least vaguely engaging.

Update 2: two weeks later, I spend a bit of a day starting the “paint” phase. I need to get quicker at this. I’m hoping practice will help!

Still going, from time to time. Goodness, this is slow!

(click image to enlarge)

One of my favourite pieces of recent civil engineering, the Weston Hills Tunnels. This is one of the first things I’ve drawn without tracing a photographic original, though I did have photographic references to consult by eye. I wanted to represent a kind of transition going through the tunnels, so I did my best to make through-tunnel Constable/Gainsborough stylee (best seen in the closeup), and in brighter colours, and to make the nearside all a bit grey and imposing, and machine generated, like a diagram. The idea is that the tunnel would stand out as a thing a bit like an SF jump-gate, as a kind of alien artefact embedded in a natural landscape, which is kind of like the way we escape from the modern world by its own agency. On the other side, of course, is Letchworth, which was the first Garden City, which was a similar kind of attempt.
I’ve no idea if any of that comes across, as I’ve not really got much in the way of technique!

I particularly love the shortness of these tunnels, so that when you go through them, the change is so abrupt, and the way they are curved in almost every dimension, which made it a real pig to sketch. The arrows are great, too, leading you on. It reminds me a bit like the end of 2001 when I go through them.

One of the best views of these tunnels in their landscape is from the train, on the left just before Letchworth station. I tried to make the plane the focus of the image to lead people through by making it the only red thing, and a cross, right in the dead middle of the image. The most fun bit was doing the textures of the grass, fields, etc. Ubuntu+GIMP+Graphire. Took a long time to do, but I’m getting quicker, I think, .

The so-called work in progress has in fact seen practically no progress for several years. At one end, it’s suffering from a traditional kind of writer’s block—I had ambitious (in terms of technique, rather than size) plans which I’ve realised I have no idea how to pull off. (First-person narration needs to convey a piece of information to the reader without the narrator being aware of it, and without ever breaking out of first-person.) At the other, there’s a purely practical block going on in terms of finding the space in my life to sit down with a solid chunk of a couple of hours to write in, which is what I need to get anywhere.

And in-between is the stuff which worries at me. Namely, is the work even worth progressing? I still want to tell the story (and the one that follows). I desperately want to do something with the setting and genre (“canal punk” fantasy mystery). But. There are Problems.

1. The names, for the most part, suck. Because they’re pretty much all just placeholders. If I went into trying to invent proper names, I’d get distracted into inventing languages, and I need at least five of those. But they’ve been attached to their characters and places and languages for so long now that it’s going to be difficult to think in other terms.
2. Relatedly, I thought the trick of writing the occasional words and phrases which are supposed to be in one of these other languages in French was quite good. After all, whatever the characters are mostly speaking, it isn’t English, so why shouldn’t their second language be similarly “translated”? However, I’ve been told that this is a Really Bad Idea, which completely blows my confidence in what I’m doing.
3. The character of the narrator makes dramatic tension rather difficult. Because he’s wealthy, well-connected and magically gifted, it’s rather hard to put him into any situation where there’s any real peril. (It’s kind of the point that he is all these things and still manages to cock it up all by himself.)
4. On top of that, I’ve just realised that his narrative style is seriously deadpan. Which is entirely appropriate to how he is, but I’m worried that it results in a lack of engagement.

So, I don’t know whether it’s worth my while ploughing through this edifice, or scratching this project and taking what I’ve learned, particularly about what makes a narrator, and starting over.

Of the sporadic but okish quantity of drawing and painting I’ve done in the last 3 years (a massive amount compared to 5 sketches I did in the 15 years previous) I am most proud of the one shown above.

It’s not thought out, not accomplished but it was spontaneous and done in spit and ink. There are several in my sketch book in this sequence and they were done at the All about Eve exhibition that Kettles Yard held in when the Rodin exhibition was on in London.

The last time a major Rodin exhibition was held in this county was at the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank and I went along with the rest of the students from my art college. The original plan was to crash through the exhibition and bugger off to the pub. Faced with sculpture upon sculpture of by this astonishing force of nature, we all dropped our crappy coolness and got down to some serious drawing. We didn’t get to the pub. By sketching his work I started to understand his vigour, his conflicts, his desire. All I had with me was a biro and my sketch book but I found myself digging it into the page forcefully as I tried learn by rote the lines he had set down.

Picking up my pens and pencils and forcing myself to draw is like dragging myself to go and do the washing up sometimes. I don’t leap at the the page with joy. I look at it in fear and loathing so often. That’s why drawing in a group can be so useful because the joint discipline gets you moving.

Being at close quarters with Rodin again 20 or more years later reacquainted me with a passion for drawing. A fierce need to get marks onto paper – as urgent a need as kissing a lover. I’d brought my sketch book but had forgotten my pencil case. All I had was a black pen. The echoes of my last encounter were very strong and old confidence floated back into my fingers and I happily gouged into the paper and spat onto my fingers to make smudges for tone.

Drawing Rodin’s Eve enabled me to discover far more that I would have done just by looking. My close observations helped me realise that the model he used was in the early stages of pregnancy (confirmed later on in the exhibition – it was a possible reason why he never finished the study), and that the hands were the most finished part of the sculpture – incredibly delicate compared to the rest of her healthy sturdiness. I did about 4 rough sketches, none took more than 5 mins.

The last time I was that happy painting was trying a new technique at the Oxford art group I was part of. Kieran, our mentor (teacher I guess but it feels too formal) would get us to try a new method every week and this one involved doing a very rough sketch and then taking a putty rubber and randomly rubbing most of the drawing out. Then you would repeat this process over and over and gradually your drawing would emerge on the page as if it were a photograph in developing fluid. I got completely absorbed by the materials I was using. The result was one of my favourite drawings of my own work. And it is of a bloody cheeseplant of all things. The following week I tried to repeat the experience and failed utterly. I think it was because I was trying to achieve a preconceived result rather than getting lost in the process.

This may well be my big huge lesson for my drawing and painting and I can see it taking me a few damn years. Actually now I come to write about it about this, the lesson seems very clear. My trouble when I go out with my sketchbook is that I have some monkey on my back telling to render my chosen view with ‘artistic accuracy’. This is a silly notion. All the successful pieces I’ve done have all been a result of me exploring with the medium.

Please hit me over the head with this when I forget.