The Daleked Dog

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for my one of my favourite Henry Lawson short stories, the 1901 story “The Loaded Dog”. It is about a dog which on its own caused more destruction than most Daleks, and was a favourite story for our family to read aloud when visitors were staying, or between larger books. You can read it in the collection Joe Wilson and his Mates, available from Project Gutenberg (“The Ghostly Door”, in that collection, is also a classic, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for the dog v ghost story “They Called Him Ally for Short”, about a dog called Alligator Desolation).

I do plan to draw more Daleks, but this is the last I had in the backlog and I have some upcoming deadlines (and I’d like to do some more duck drawings as well), so they may continue intermittent.

Also, I just returned from holidays and now have to go watch the first episode of this season!

 

My Dalek Goes Bung

Once upon a time, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin wrote the novel My Brilliant Career. It was published in 1901, was (inexplicably to me, when last I read it) much loved, and was made into a classic Australian film in 1979 (with a very young Sam Neill). I disliked it extremely, no doubt because I was at an age where all stories must end happily (in the Girl! Marry Harry Beecham!! sense), particularly those set in something like my own world (and they so rarely did). So the story has lived in a small, sour corner of my memory for years, enlivened once by discovering the name of the sequel was My Career Goes Bung. That won me back to the side of Miles Franklin, though not the original novel. And then, in February, I read David Golding’s review and now… I think I may have to read it.

 

The Fault in our Daleks (with bonus dragon)

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for John Green’s new novel The Fault in our Stars which is… I don’t know how best to describe it: a funny novel about cancer? a touching novel about teenagers? a heartbreaking novel about finishing novels? It was lent to me by Faultty last weekend (when I dropped by for tea and sponge cake), so I have not yet had time to fully think out my thoughts on it, but they involve life, video games, Holland, embroidered throw pillows and people having their own stories.

This is my second John Green novel – the first was Paper Towns – and although they are not quite my usual genre I like his style, the familiar worlds, the sudden odd angles the plots take. And I love the wider Green-fandom, which is like a strange mirror of my own circles of enthusiasts: like his novels, a curiously familiar yet dragon-free world.

In other news: Why yes, that is a dragon in the header.

In a move which could have turned out badly, Kelly and Gavin pressed Naomi Novik’s Temeraire: His Majesty’s Dragon (Napoleonic war with added dragons) into my hands on Tuesday. I vanished into the book for several days and now emerge, flailing slightly and drawing dragons. This is pen and ink with colour and texture added digitally – you can see a larger version of it on its Flickr page or here.

My disappearance from the world of deadlines and emails is unjustifiable, but the drawing is not as:

1. I needed to get dragons out of my system (and read either the next book or some C S Forester) long enough to work on some new projects; and
2. The first of 18 identified steps for the next project was to buy and test out some new illustration card, and with this I have. I am pretty happy with it – it isn’t as velvety as my usual drawing paper but it is smoother and brighter and seems to scan well, although new nibs can accidentally rough it up a bit.

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is also an excuse to practise drawing donkeys – one day the necessity will arise! I think it is a little better than the last one (for the same play – I am only practising donkey heads). Certainly cuter, and when drawing Daleks that is evidently the prime consideration.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not my favourite Shakespeare – I have not decided what is. Neither its title nor its stage directions are as wonderful as A Midwinter’s Tale (although I had to wait for J. K. Rowling before I learned how to pronounce Hermione). I am not certain why I resist it – perhaps because it conjures up such a floating, sweet image, although that isn’t what I get when I sit down and read it. Perhaps it is the general connotation it takes in the collective consciousness? A shame, if it is, because parts of it are – or should be – hysterically funny.

My current favourite references/adaptations/reworkings of it are:

• Dead Poet’s Society (directed by Peter Weir and written by Tom Schulman) - for the ethereal tragedy (I get flashbacks to this whenever I watch House).
• Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies – for a very funny, very nasty, very (what? respectful? faithful? something different but equal to that) Discworld take on the story, with all of the beauty that ought to be there and all of the horror and earthy bloodiness which makes the beauty terrifying. Also the stick-and-bucket dance. I commend to you Tansy Rayner Robert’s post on this book: Slash! Stab! A Lesson in Practical Queening.
• Neil Gaiman’s short graphic story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (drawn by Charles Vess and coloured by Steve Oliff) – for an interleaving of the play with its historical setting and performance, within the story of Sandman: complex, beautiful, complete.

It would be easy, I suspect, to take a wholly unpleasant reading of the play – no doubt it has been done. I appreciate the role of that sort of reading and storytelling, but it usually feels to me more as comment/exercise than a distinct and independent Thing In The World. What I love about the pieces above is that none of them disregard the beauty which is associated with the story in order to rewrite it into nastiness. They are all truly beautiful. But the loveliness which could be merely pretty or at worst cloying is not only offset by the darkness: together they make something very solid and elegant and – without detracting at all from that – funny. All three have scenes which still, in recollection, make me laugh aloud (“this desk set was made to fly”).

I’m reminded of Catherynne M Valente’s story “A Delicate Architecture”, in which sweetness must be offset by the hint of salt and marrow. Which conveniently leads me to…

In other news: To Spin a Darker Stair, a boutique collection of two short stories by Catherynne M Valente and Faith Mudge, and illustrated by me, is on pre-order from Fablecroft Press (more news on the cover when it appears). Also, speaking of English takes on fairy queens (and taking on English fairy queens), I drew some pictures of Janet and Tam Lin for Illustration Friday.

 

Illustration Friday: Fluid (and fairytales)

Pen and ink with digital colour. I love the constant transition in fairytales – human to tree to bird to animal…

In Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” class on the weekend, one of the exercises was to make (and maintain) a list of elements we really liked in stories, and another of ones which disturbed us. I may post the full list in time, but  this is one of the elements I like – characters who easily and naturally shift between states. Not “shape shifters” as such (were-creatures, for example, although I don’t mind the odd one), but beings which appear part physical, part metaphorical – the thorn-lady of Diana Wynne Jones’ Deep Secret, the Faery Queen starting up out of a bush o’ broom in the ballad of Tam Lin, Tam Lin’s own transformations (man and creature and glowing iron), the shifting dream-states of Wonderland. The ageing, elongating, bulging, shifting, feather-grown variations of Studio Ghibli characters. Cat Valente’s princess in a tower, trapped between states, her mysterious pirate captain. Selkies, moving to and fro between seal and human (unless someone intervenes). Bear-princes, crane-wives, swan-women, raven-brothers. Sometimes the changeableness is a great and beautiful power, yet often flexibility is a trap – E. Nesbit’s “Belinda and Bellamant”, the lovers of Ladyhawk, each cursed with unsychronised transformations – and a settled state (Valente’s princess again, Tam Lin helpless and human) is a basis for freedom.

It is a theme I enjoy playing with in my stories as well as illustrations – the water-to-child-to-human progression of “Mouseskin”, the promise-bound river-creature of “Undine Love”, the twined shifting background characters of “The Splendour Falls”. The purpose of transformation is different in each, of course, but often it seems to be about becoming human (mature, an adult, responsible) or relinquishing that. In others it is about forcing people to be what someone else thinks they should be.

 

The Dalek Maze

So, this instalment of the Dalek Game may be cheating just a little, since I drew the cover for the original book, but it is a very wonderful book! It is Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, a fresh, old-fashioned story of slavery, time-travel, wishes, growing up, expectations and family. I say old fashioned not only because of the settings but because it belongs to that sort of unsettling fantasy in which things don’t always go as they ought – I don’t know where it falls exactly, but it covers E Nesbit and Edward Eager.

The book’s page on Small Beer Press links to a number of reviews – including one from Fantasy Matters which reviews the cover art! I found it fascinating both to see it from someone else’s (detailed) perspective and as an understanding of the great good that is art direction.

In other news: I have been cooking kangaroo, drinking coffee, drawing Lydia Bennett, writing with friends in cafes (finished two short stories last week!) and scheming to get to Toronto. Also, the Two Bad Daleks are going to a good home, with $100 gone to the MS Society – thank you!

 

Civil Dalek in Queensland

So… in a parallel reality in which I am a lawyer I changed jobs at the beginning of this year, and now sit in an office surrounded by textbooks – it was daunting at first, and I thought I would be expected to know all of them, until closer investigation proved most of them to be very out of date and slightly dusty. 1994 texts on computer crime are particularly entertaining. This instalment of the Dalek Game, however, is for that literary giant, Civil Procedure in Queensland.

It is also for Queensland Rail’s current train etiquette campaign, (I have not yet found the name of the original illustrator) , and particularly for John and Mary (which resolved possible issues in relation to gender roles by breaking Mary’s leg).

In other news: I drew a clockwork tiger for Illustration Friday, and an illustration for Angela Slatter’s short story doctor, and for Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannett’s Lair of the Evil Drs Brain. NaNoWriMo progresses apace and has acquired, at this late stage of the ongoing story, a dog named Lastly.

Oh, and there’s a new blog header for November:

 

Dalek’s Thesaurus

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for that great and thrilling literary classic Roget’s Thesaurus. It is also an excellent argument for buying a small dalek for perspective in future drawings.

I was raised on books about words. They never moved from the kitchen catch-all, even when my father conducted his periodic lightning raid on the schoolwork and embroidery patterns and the specimens which collected in the interesting-things-basket. The Macquarie Dictionary sat with the Webster (my mother is American), the Hobson-Jobson, a few interlinear texts, Roget’s, a dictionary of quotations, a concordance and the rainfall register.

My father would stop mid-book to look up peculiar words – in the middle of conversations he still sends visitors off to verify a word’s origin. We played Tennis-Elbow-Foot on long car trips (there were no short ones) and Dictionary by lamplight during black-outs (although my father defined most words as “a rare Latvian squirrel). We read linguistic texts (last time I was home I started reading An Old English Grammar and the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language to my father, as a break from Australian war history and Pride and Prejudice).

And the main influence all this has had on me is that I am prepared to argue until you are blue in the face that Roget’s “meaning clusters” are a far more efficient and effective format than any alphabetical dictionary, and also cooler, and that dictionaries these days are cheapened by not having an appendix with diagrams of standard cuts of meat.

Also, “decimate” probably doesn’t mean what most people think it means.

Here is a fun party game: grab your rhyming dictionary, pick two sections at random and use them to write a limerick.

In other news: I saw and sketched the Queen with Deb on Monday. NaNoWriMo starts next week – I am under strict instructions to complete my current story OR ELSE, so if there is no word from me after November, ask Aimee what she did to me.

 

Illustration Friday: Scattered

A scattering of grain and chickens for this week’s Illustration Friday. I was working on a portrait commission – fine lines with a touch of colour. This piece of paper was the palette for the watercolour pencils. The chickens were drawn over the top with pen and inks (and are also a commission from my mother).

I do not romanticise chickens, but I remain broadly fond of them. When I was growing up, the chooks were my business (care, feeding, egg collection, book keeping and so forth). I was even a subscriber to a monthly poultry magazine, I knew all about hatching temperatures, Sebrights and Wyandottes. I could make and use a chook-crook and could sing “Landrace Rooster” complete. Sometimes when I went to lock them up for the night, I would look into the roost – the rough branches which made the perches had been worn satiny by generations of chicken feet and the birds would huddle down for the night crooning peacably among themselves. It was a very relaxing atmosphere – chickens are much nicer when they are asleep (fortunately, they are also easy to hypnotise).

In other news: Our comics anthology Kinds of Blue is now launched and available to buy online!

 

Cloud and Ashes and Tiptree!

Greer Gilman‘s Cloud and Ashes (and, by association, its cover) was one of the two winners of the Tiptree Award! I missed this because my superpower is obliviousness. Congratulations Greer Gilman!