Terri Windling and Kate Forsyth on Flyaway

Flyaway is out in a week! (!!!!) And two new comments have appeared about it, from two people whose taste in stories I like very much.

Terri Windling

Terry Windling’s newest Bumblehill Studio newsletter is out. (You can subscribe to the newsletter here, or support Terri on Patreon, and/or read her World Fantasy Award nominated blog Myth & Moor).

As well as news and recommendations and publishing and fairy tales, the most recent newsletter contains Terri’s note on Flyaway:

“Kathleen Jennings’ first novel, Flyaway, finally comes out this month, so I can sing its praises at last. Set in a magical version of rural Australia, and told in prose so perfect you could weep, I was stunned by the power of this slim book. I haven’t been this excited by a new voice in fantasy since reading the early stories of Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke — two very different writers, yes, but both of them expanded the boundaries of our field. In her own unique way, so does Kathleen. Please, don’t miss this gem.”

Terri Windling

Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s anthologies — and many of the writers featured in and influenced by them — shaped so much of my love of fantasy and appreciation for its possibilities. To have Terri read and love Flyaway (and Ellen be my editor!) is still a delight that’s a little hard to believe is true.

Kate Forsyth

And just as I was about to post this, Kate Forsyth‘s “What Katie Read” came out on Booktopia: What Katie Read: Kathleen Jennings, Anne Gracie, and more.

She talks about many wonderful old and new books in that post, so you should read the whole thing (Dorothy Sayers!), but she also reviews Flyaway, concluding:

“…The result is a dark and delicate fairy-tale-infused mystery set in a hot, dry, dingo-howl haunted Australian landscape – such a fresh voice and intriguing tale!“

Kate Forsyth

Kate is a dear and splendid Australian writer of fantasy and fairy tales, and one whom I’ve had the chance to work with once or twice — and hopefully one day soon again! And it is so lovely to know the people whose taste you admire have read something you’ve written, and got it.

Flyaway: A real book

Picture from the team at Tor.com

Look at these beautiful books! The US edition (Tor.com) exists (although it officially comes out on the 28th of July). The dust jacket and the foils and the stamp (they’ve already given me a copy of that, in the event I get to actually sign physical books for people).

“It’s a dark & delicate fairytale-infused mystery set in a hot, dry, dingo-howl haunted Australian landscape — such a fresh voice & intriguing tale!”

— Kate Forsyth

The American (Tor.com) and Australian (Picador) editions are both available for preorder through your local bookstore, and further afield.

On silhouettes and further points of connection

This follows on from yesterday’s post about the structural role of triangles in editing and silhouettes. It’s about the points that connect and strengthen fragile pieces of a design (or, if you wish to extend the metaphor in yesterday’s post, of a piece of writing).

This image is my cover design for Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins‘ Aurealis-Award-winning collection of linked stories, The Silver Well (Ticonderoga Publications, 2017).

It’s originally a cut paper silhouette that I then used to make a cyanotype print.

The physical silhouette is delicate (see yesterday’s post for some examples of scale). While structural requirements of cut-paper silhouettes don’t technically matter for a printed cover, they do for the original art (and I enjoy the constraints it gives me to push against, and the physical possibilities and effects they open up for the illustration).

In this case, there were competing requirements. The silhouette needed to look open, airy, and leafy — not like a complete net. But it also needed to be robust enough to (a) withstand the cutting-out of neighbouring tiny pieces, (b) tolerate being picked up, turned over, scanned, printed with, etc, and (c) hold up when framed, and not tear or sag under its own slight but not insignificant weight.

I dealt with this by tiny overlaps and glancing tangents. These can be a problem in some styles of art, but they’re largely invisible in silhouettes — and need to be, to help with the illusion of twigs and leaves waving free in the wind.

Red circles showing points of connection

These points mean that the tiny twigs support each other in space. They lock together to create a larger rigid areas. I’ve highlighted those areas below.

Green areas are the strongest, red areas are more isolated

The strongest areas are the ones in green  — roughly triangular, they’re joined to the larger design along one whole edge, which makes them very stable. The red areas are stable in themselves, but they only connect to the larger design at one point, which means they can still shift about, and that all their weight pulls on that one narrow connection.

In that case, I’d usually at least pay some extra attention to that one point — flaring or thickening it slightly. But I could also have locked the design down further by joining it at least at the yellow circles shown below.

Yellow circles show likely connection points that would add physical strength

Joining it there would have created a much larger rigid area, as shaded in yellow below. But it might also have made the design that bit too dense and self-enclosed for an illustrated branch, more suited to, e.g., a lace edging.  But it is an illustration, and some parts have to be given their freedom.

The extra connection points would have created this larger area

When I begin a silhouette design, I don’t sit down and count up the connections. The process itself, born of experience and accident and a bit of lacemaking at one point — feels more organic.

Thumbnail sketches for the cover of The Silver Well

The designs starts with looping scribbles and works its way towards a final arrangement that pleases me. And yet the points where those sketched loops cross over each other have power, and by the final stage those points of connection come into play, tying it all together.

To link it back to writing and editing: those points of connection are often the ones that need to be tightened during editing — little clarifying comments, ambiguous foreshadowing, word choices that resonate across apparently unrelated sections.

Here, by the way, is the final cover — the Aurealis-Award-winning book (which is lovely, and has internal illustrations too) is available from Ticonderoga Publications.

The Silver Well: Book launch (with art exhibition)

“One English village. Two thousand years of stories. Best-selling legends of Australian fantasy Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins have teamed up in this collection of 7 incredible stories, all original and never-before published.”

I’ve had the honour of creating the cover art and internal illustrations for this brand new collection by the inimitable Kate Forsyth and Kim Wilkins.

It is currently launching around Australia, with the Brisbane launch next Wednesday 29 November at Avid Reader (free, but bookings essential). That launch will be accompanied by an exhibition of the original cut paper/cyanotype cover (if I can get it to lie flat) and pen-and-ink internal illustrations.

The Sydney launch will be on 30 November at Galaxy Books, launched by Garth Nix (but the only art will be in the books).

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Cover Art: The Rebirth of Rapunzel

Boxes of books have arrived at my house! A delivery for Fablecroft Publishing for Contact2016 (the national convention, this weekend).

This is the cover, with my art, for Kate Forsyth‘s The Rebirth of Rapunzel, the PhD exegesis which accompanied her novel Bitter Greens. It will be launched at Contact, here in Brisbane, this weekend.

Both the main and background illustrations are originally scratchboard designs. Here’s a progress shot.

We were going for an old-school pamphlet/midcentury letterpress poetry vibe, and I really like the font Fablecroft chose.

 

The late week

• Monsters! This new, Karen Beilharz-helmed anthology of comics (with sea monsters by me) is now funding on Pozible. It’s all written and illustrated but we need the pre-orders to get it printed. Rewards include a map by me. (Because it’s been asked, and Pozible isn’t entirely clear on this: if you want to help, but don’t necessarily want a book, you can enter an amount here: Pledge amount). The first comic, “Monster Hunter”, has been posted already.
• Rapunzel: Fablecroft is publishing Kate Forsyth’s PhD exegesis The Rebirth of Rapunzel: A Mythic Biography of the Maiden in the Tower (background pattern and cover art by me).

• Deep Dark Fears: Late to this party, but Deep Dark Fears is deliciously evocative and unsettling, and I have ordered the book.
• Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Went twice, went with incredibly low expectations, had a ball, see it while it’s in cinemas. It’s also got a number of Easter eggs for long-term Austen fans. But I mistook Sam Riley for Kris Marshall and was confused (although not unpleasantly so).

I'm just saying pic.twitter.com/uZ8Fam3gKQ

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) March 1, 2016

• Science! If you like science communication and illustration, the #sciart tweetstorm is currently on.
• Two new books:
  • The first translation in over 100 years of Jules Verne’s Mikhail Strogoff, from Eagle Books (a new imprint of Christmas Press), with illustrations and gold-edged pages and just the right size to fit comfortably in the hand and handbag.
  • The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the way Home, the last book of Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland books, which I will buy but which I am afraid it will hurt to read because they are so perfect in themselves that I am sure the ending will be like a knife.
• Coffee in Oxley: If you are ever in the western suburbs of Brisbane, check out Re/Love Oxley on Blunder Road – a good little cafe with an industrial shed of old and kitschy things, including pyromaniacal sewing machines.

This is a good cafe pic.twitter.com/SIAQlazPCk

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) March 2, 2016

• Cake: “If your mother didn’t make you a cake from this book she didn’t love you enough…” Or: growing up in Australia (apparently a hit in Israel too, which I did not know).
• Tremontaine! Saga Press is going to print editions of several Serial Box titles, including Tremontaine (no word on art at present).
• Writing: Finished the first pass edit of the current manuscript (the small shapely one, as opposed to the large amorphous one which is still out with friends having its flaws diagnosed).
• Pretty things: If you like them, this is my sister’s blog: Mrs M Loves.

Love pretty things? Skip on over to https://t.co/2AEv6JZb1a for the fun and finer things in life xx #mrsmloves pic.twitter.com/K2H2KqxhmH

— Bec Moore (@mrsm_loves) February 23, 2016

• On looking too long at art reference: Seals are really weird and if you look at them too long it is like staring too hard at the word “walk” or “amongst”. They cease to be unique functioning objects and become gaps in the world, free-floating black holes, units of the matter before eternity. They refuse to be what you desire or believe them to be. If you gaze too long into the seal, the seal gazes back into you.
• ‘A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain’ – this whole stream of tweets is delightful:

In love with the fact that in 1585 Francis Walsingham drew up a document titled 'A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain'

— John Gallagher (@earlymodernjohn) March 4, 2016

• Style: Peter de Sève on artist’s style, although I believe it applies equally to any creative endeavour:
  “An artist’s drawing is a catalogue of the shapes that he loves. When I’m drawing something, I’m trying to find the shapes that please me. I believe that’s what makes up what people refer to as a style.”
• Lessons learned: One thing I am repeatedly learning this year is how little you can get done in a day, and how much in half an hour.