The Dalek Less Travelled

Oh look a Dalek!

This instalment of the game is for a book by Stephen Fry (yes, that Stephen Fry): the readable, entertaining and beautifully validating explanatory/musing/instructional guide to poetic forms, The Ode Less Travelled. I love this book. It is very practical, far from dry, genuinely useful as a reference guide, a practical course, a lever for disengaging the angst from the rigour, and a handy-sized object for beating friends over the head with until they produce werewolf sestinas (Caitlene, I know where you live).

The drawing is also in honour of travelling at home, on two fronts: the one where you do all the things at home you like to do travelling (for me, that is sketching in cafes and writing in restaurant windows, so that works out well); and the one where you plan trips to very-likely-Dartmoor-after-World-Fantasy-this-November. So please feel free to let me know if you know the identity of the mysterious “iconic figure in Australian land law” who is connected with Dartmoor. That person is not the reason for going to Dartmoor, but I received a flyer for the 2nd Annual UK Property Case Law Tour today, and now I need to know!

Also, I just finished a new book cover and set of internal illustrations for an amazing collection of stories for an author whose last publication from the same press was illustrated by one of my heroes of illustration and I’m just going to faint quietly off the back of the chair now.

 

 

Daleks of the Road

This instalment of the Dalek Game is forMichael Chabon’s novel Gentlemen of the Road. You will note I have not even attempted to approximate a reference to Gary Gianni’s entirely perfect illustrations.

The novel as a whole (the words, the green and gold cover in which I bought it, Gianni’s wholehearted images) is a fascinating performance, utterly styled without being stylised. Chabon performs genres beautifully, like the best of Shyamalan. Not like a quick, accurate costume, but something like an old tableaux vivant, with all the details right and breathing poses held still for admiration and inspection or… something. They aren’t dead at all, or false – he does literary fiction, or science fiction, or noir or (as here) Rider Haggard adventure sincerely, lovingly and very delightedly aware of the story as story.

Now that I think about it, this is what bothered me about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Not that someone had the idea, at all – I love that Seth Grahame-Smith not only had the idea but did something about it. But P&P&Z felt to me, at the end, like an exercise in a title. It had the brain, but never quite got to the heart. Whereas, while Chabon’s big ideas might easily be presented as equally odd as any of Grahame-Smith’s essays in juxtaposition, I lose myself in the world of the story, in the whole book, the thing itself, and forget the author’s cleverness because of it.

 

Dalek of the Pigeons

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, one of the earlier urban fantasy (in the older sense of that term) books which I read, not including that odd twilight world of children’s and YA novels which hadn’t been separated out by genre yet. I am not sure if this was the book that won me over to it – I do remember being charmed by it, and sad, and the shifting nature of the world peculiar to the sort of urban fantasy I like. I was already won over to Lindholm’s writing by reason of her also being Robin Hobb, whose Farseer books I bought purely on the basis of a John Howe cover, and even convinced my little sister (inveterate non-fiction and Grisham reader) to read.

In other news: The year is off to a promising, undead start with January’s calendar illustration, impressive temperatures, lots of coffee, watching The Mousetrap with my mother, testing centrifugal forces in a playground with my cousins, and a house thinly coated in chalk-and-ink dust.

 

Comics and ebooks

Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear (including my short story “Kindling“) is now available in a Kindle edition from Amazon.

Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (including my comic “Finishing School“) is available as an ebook from a number of places. That should include iTunes, but possibly not in Australia yet.

I have just sent off the art for a new comic, which I hope will become a Real Thing, subject to various approvals. In the meantime, the picture at the top of the page is a personality comparison between my last comic heroine, Gwen, and my new one whose name is not currently used (but is Marilyn). I’ve been trying to loosen up and be a lot sketchier for this comic – “Finishing School” betrays signs of terror and excessive caution – and there are a few panels where I could feel that clicking. I’m not sure you can tell by looking which panels they are, but I can see where I began to let go.

I had to force that – blowing up the original thumbnail sketches, putting clean paper over them on a light box and going straight to inks with a dip pen, instead of doing complete-blue-pencil-and-technical-pen as for “Finishing School”.

 

The Name of the Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (and of course for this BBC video). The Name of the Rose was the first Eco I read, after a very dim memory of a select few scenes of the movie viewed once in class. I fell in love with it, and although I don’t have the clearest memory of its individual parts now, I still have great affection for the sum of the novel, which bore me through several more of Eco’s works to discover the impossible, wrathful, byzantine takedown that is Foucault’s Pendulum. I have even attempted to read The Name of the Rose in German. Well, I have acquired it in German. In truth, the English was translated from Italian and a fair proportion of the words weren’t even in my dictionary, so the experience of reading it in German was (along with Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger, possibly the only time those books have been compared*) comparable to Vizzini’s seamanship :”Move that thing and – that other thing!”.

*Or not. Turns out there are connections.

In other news: Part 2 of the American Sketchbook is up: Illuxcon, New York and Colorado. The table of contents for the upcoming Fablecroft anthology One Small Step has been released, including stories by many wonderful authors and my “Ella and the Flame”. And I finished inking a largeish project last night, so rewarded myself by catching up on the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is just fun (perfect, perfect Lydia).

 

Dalekriders of Pern

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, and was a special commission. It’s been a while since I read these!

In other news: Road-testing an iPad. Jury remains out. Also rereading Our Mutual Friend, and that is going very well. And trying to get my affairs in order before going to North America, which – argh. Affairs had been allowed to lapse. But I’m getting there!

 

Our Mutual Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for my very favourite Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, my appreciation for which I have previously expressed. I still love it. It is excessively elaborate, indulgent, melodramatic, neat, funny, and odd. After an intensive course of Heyer rereads, which has left me criticising things by saying they are “nothing out of the common way”, I am about to read Our Mutual Friend again, for its skilled taxidermists and harmless pieces of dinner furniture, Red Riding Hood references, reversals of fortune and very satisfying ending. And then I will probably watch the miniseries again, for all that and Paul McGann.

 

The Dalek of the Dawn Treader

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and most particularly for Reepicheep (the bold, the indomitable, the vain, the… always reminded me very slightly of Hercule Poirot?) Dawn Treader is not my favourite of the Chronicles of Narnia, and yet it has so many of my favourite scenes – falling into the painting, Lucy in Caspian’s tunic, Eustace crying to the moon, Goldwater, the lily sea. And it does have one of my favourite first lines, out of so many: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

Each of the novels has so much its own feel – the odd, mannered Edwardian fantasy and fresh discovery of The Magician’s Nephew, the childlike, wish-fulfilment, occasionally dark, myth-steeped allegory of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the untouched-by our world, desert-city-mountain, 1001-nights pursuit of The Horse and his Boy, the midnight, lost-heir, cloak-and-dagger battles (and that taste of adult loss) of Prince Caspian, the salt-air and white-sails episodic quest (within quest) Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the death, betrayal and depression of The Silver Chair, the sweeping, contained, final beginning of The Last Battle. And Pauline Baynes’ illustrations catch each style with such perfect, consistent flexibility.

This is how I most like series, I think. Linked, locked into each other, yet each complete and Its Own Story. Diana Wynne Jones did this as well, although in a more extreme fashion across fewer books. It satisfies my desire for more story, while not ruining my memory of an already-perfect tale.

 

One Was Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Maurice Sendak’s best book, One Was Johnny. I’m a fan of Alligators All Around and A Hole is to Dig, etc (and this one, of course) but this counting rhyme of an antisocial reader with too many unexpected guests was my first and remains my favourite.

It also explains a lot about Daleks.

In other news: Hello, I am still here! I have had a lot of speed-reading to do for upcoming jobs, and other things which shall be revealed… Also, I finished reading through my Large Amorphous Manuscript and breaking it into scenes, preparatory to editing it, AND I have almost finished a short story. I have not seen much sunshine.

 

The Girl with No Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Angela Slatter’s dark enchanting fairytale short stories collected in The Girl with No Hands, and other tales.

I love fairytale retellings, reworkings, reimaginings – old stories turned out and new stories recognisably true in the context of the old, rules which shift and change but are always the rules of that world. And the colours of fairytales! Sky blue, raven black, dresses of peacock feathers, skin with the sheen of flowers…

More myths and legends, new and re-embroidered, are to come soon from Angela and Lisa…

In other news: In addition to recent cover art activities, I have begun to take a… well, neither closer nor frank & fearless, but at least A Look at the LAM (Large Amorphous Manuscript). Which is, of course, full of fairytales.