Ali

Coyote Dances with the Stars

Drawings for Fairy Stories 5 Responses »

Nov 092011

Ah, Coyote. He’s one of the many glories of Native American folk stories and, for me, perhaps the prime glory. He’s a lot like the fox in European folk stories, in that he can be good or bad, wise or foolish, or all of these things at once. In short, he’s very human, and that’s why I love him. Now, after seemingly endless airbrushing, I’ve finally finished work on one of my favourite Coyote stories. It’s a Cheyenne tale, and one of the places you can find it is in the fantastic American Indian Myths and Legends.

Originally I was just going to draw a few quick sketches and post them up along with a link to the text. Then I started having trouble drawing stars – thank you to those on twitter who heeded my pained cries. The stars in the story are living beings, so I wanted to draw them as such, rather than as big balls of gas. But how? I didn’t really ever figure that out, so when I wrote up my own version of the story I left the visuals out and decided instead to draw my own ideas together into one giant picture of the galaxy. Click on the final illustration to explore it close up. It’s quite large, as space should be, so I hope it loads okay and doesn’t reduce your monitor to smoke and exposed springs (which is what monitors are made of, right?).

Here’s Coyote Dances with the Stars.

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Stars, Turned Inside Out

Drawings for Fairy Stories, Recommendations 3 Responses »

Oct 212011

The book industry’s an odd one. About three weeks ago I finished handwriting the first draft of my third novel, which I’ve since been typing up to see what I’ve got on my hands. In the meantime my second book, The Man who Rained, is at the printers being turned into something glossy and pretty and ready, come January, to go out into the big wide world. Always as a writer you’re working on something a step ahead of where it appears you are now. I was writing The Man who Rained when The Girl with Glass Feet came out, and I hope to be writing something new when/if the novel I’ve recently started sees the light of day.

All of that makes me really appreciative of those of you who’ve taken the time to read this blog, or comment on twitter or facebook or by email. It’s preciously immediate, and that (along with the fact that you’re all such lovely people) is the reason why I enjoy sharing things with you. For a while now I’ve been hoping to give you a new fairy tale. It’s taking me longer than anticipated so, in the meantime, here are a few previews.

cdwts3 cdwts4

cdwts1 cdwts2

The reason for the delay is the drawing of stars. There are stars in this story, but they aren’t just orbs of fire. They’re living beings, and working out how to portray them as such has stumped me. Maybe I’m just burnt out with personification (The Man who Rained is all about the weather coming to life) but I’ve at least decided I want to use a certain technique to draw stars: I want to make negative images with graphite sticks and pencils, then invert them using paint software to get a luminous effect.

Here’s a test run I did. This won’t make the final cut, but it gives you an idea of how the game works. This

becomes this

So maybe next week, maybe the week after, I’ll have cracked it and can finally post the fairy story. For now I’d better get back to the typing. My handwriting is a tangle and unravelling it is a slow process. Some parts I simply can’t read, and I have to hold them up to the light or stare at them like magic eye patterns. It’s fun deciphering it, but it’s slooooowww.

In the meantime I want to recommend this. I hope that Ghostpoet goes on to festoon his pork pie hat with awards, for he richly deserves them. This is a track that writers are bound to relate to, and the album Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam is swiftly becoming the soundtrack to the pitter-patter of my keyboard. Enjoy…

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Luke Pearson

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Oct 062011

In the last couple of years I’ve waited until the end of the year to put together a list of things I’ve loved from the preceding twelve months. I probably shan’t be doing that this year, because I’ll have a new book out in January and lots to say about it. So, in the meantime I have a few things I’m itching to recommend to you, things I’ve recently enjoyed that I hope might tickle your fancy too.

I discovered Nobrow Press after a trip to the fabulous Gosh Comics in London. I’d just been to see the Afghanistan exhibition at the British Museum, and Gosh had Nobrow’s Bento Bestiary featured on their shelves. Ancient History + Comics + Bestiary = A Super Day Out (and I know I couldn’t get much geekier – just you wait until later in the blog when I start talking about video games).

Nobrow publish some beautiful hardback comics. If you were raised on Ladybird books and the like, holding these A5 delights in your paws will give you a sweet nostalgic kick. Via Nobrow’s website I came upon the intriguing Everything We Miss, by Luke Pearson.

The entire book is coloured in the shades of grey and orange you see here, which give it a dead-of-night tone befitting its dreamlike subject matter. We follow the misfortunes of the hapless Will, who we watch over as his relationship unravels. Meanwhile, all around but unbeknown to him, beautiful mysteries are taking place. You’ll see what I mean from the preview on Luke Pearson’s site. The hairball aliens were a favourite of mine.

This is a comic to read and reread. To me, it has a lot to say about the myopia of day-to-day life, with the background magic – the things that are overtly missed – directly equivalent to the elusive magic that can occur between two people. It also showcases how peculiarly susceptible men are to this insensitivity. Indeed, for those of us possessing a Y chromosome, the comic provides plenty of tooth-paste smearing, milk-spilling, toilet-bowl-missing moments that are all too depressingly familiar. Hopefully, those of you who got two Xs from the genetic lottery will find these moments touching, but Pearson delivers them with such bathos that I’m sure you’ll be laughing either way.

Pearson has also provided the artwork for an interesting little browser-based game called The End. This from the game’s blurb: “The game takes the player on a metaphysical journey, recording their interactions in the world to reveal their attitudes towards mortality. These views are presented alongside their friends and some of the most important thinkers of our time, such as Gandhi, Descartes and Einstein.” You also get to make yourself look funky. Here’s me, stuck at the second part of level 1. If you play it and get past this, please write to tell me how. I’ve been pulling those switches and playing with shadows all morning.

Best of all, Pearson has some new work about to come out. Yesterday, Nobrow previewed Hilda and the Midnight Giant. It looks thoughtful and adorable, and I can’t wait…

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Panotii

Figments: A Bestiary Comments Off

Sep 272011

She is one of the Panotii. She has ears so big that she can hear evil. Sometimes she goes out with no clothes on, because her ears are big enough to wrap around her and keep her warm.

She lives on an island along with the other Panotii. Noted cataloguer of made-up beings, Pliny the Elder, wrote that this place, this All-Ears Island, lay somewhere within landlocked Asia. Another ancient geographer, Pomponius Mela, thought it was one of the Orkney Isles. Thankfully, the mapmakers of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a 700-year-old map inked onto vellum, cleared up the matter. Their Mappa Mundi is a fabulous work, as attested to here

What the BBC video doesn’t show is a little island in the top left of the map. Squint at this and you’ll see it…

…but in case you couldn’t make it out, here’s a close-up.

Phanedii

That’s All-Ears Island, and let me give you its geographical context in the world as we know it. The furthest north point on this map is India, and the British Isles are in the bottom left, at about eight o’clock. That circle in the centre of the map is Jerusalem. Midway between Jerusalem and ten o’clock is Noah’s Ark, while Gog and Magog are closer to eleven. By now you should have a pretty clear idea of where All-Ears Island exists.

Time for a big-eared interlude, because it’s cute to do so.

Sebastian Brant wrote about the Panotti in his edition of Aesop’s Fables (that’s his woodcut, above, from page 372), while they also appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle (below) and in the bottom right corner of this elaborate stone relief from the Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in France.

The British Library has another fabulous image on its site, into which you can zoom and zoom until you can see the brush marks in the ink

I like the way this Panotii has rolled up its ears to either eschew decency or catch some sun. The BL’s accompanying article states that the Panotii can even escape from danger by flapping their ears and flying away. Which reminds me of this…

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The Man Who Rained

The Man who Rained 5 Responses »

Sep 212011

Hello folks, and apologies for the recent radio silence. I go through phases where I feel terribly old fashioned about the Internet and want to do all things with pen and paper, and perhaps a graphite stick or two. I’m writing my third novel at the moment and it’s all being done in scruffy notebooks with green ink. I can barely read my own handwriting, so it’s going to be a devil to type up, but more on that in the far future.

It’s time, I think, to spill some of the beans on The Man Who Rained. Last week I sent back the proofs to the publisher, which means that I’ve made my final set of tweaks and my work on it is done. As we get nearer the release date (January 1st), I’ll have lots more to share with you. For now, here’s the splendid cover design by Rose Cooper, and beneath it the blurb from the back cover.

From the Desmond Elliott prize-winning author of The Girl with Glass Feet comes another magical novel of love, discovery and nature.

When Elsa’s father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape – from New York, her job, her boyfriend – to somewhere new, anonymous, set apart.

For some years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. Thunderstown has received many a pilgrim, and young Elsa becomes its latest – drawn to this weather-ravaged backwater, this place rendered otherworldly by the superstitions of its denizens.

In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. For Finn has an incredible secret: he has a thunderstorm inside of him. Not everyone in town wants happiness for Elsa and Finn. As events turn against them, can they weather the tempest – can they survive at all?

The Man Who Rained is a work of lyrical, mercurial magic and imagination, a modern-day fable about the elements of love.

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Figments

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Jul 222011

One of my all-time favourite books is Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. I’ve talked before about my love of bestiaries, and this one is perhaps the finest ever compiled. It takes a scattered, all-inclusive approach to the creatures it describes, with Borges hopping about from anecdote to anecdote and placing ‘classical’ beasts alongside those imagined by some of his favourite contemporary authors. I’m building a little collection of bestiaries, at the head of which it proudly sits.

For a while now I’ve wanted to start blogging about made-up animals and unique creatures – monsters, for lack of a better word. I use “monster” hesitantly, because I think monsters are in a bad place at the moment. The monsters we tend to see on the cinema screen, for example, are like beaten-down circus animals made to perform in ways that demean them. These monsters are rationalised to the point of familiarity. They are made into species, so that they can be ridden, tamed, fed, patted on the head…

That’s fine, of course, it serves a storytelling and spectacle-inducing purpose, but real monsters don’t make sense like that. They should be impossible by definition, and therefore wondrous or terrifying or both. So I’m going to start trying to share some of my favourites with you, as a kind of tribute to The Book of Imaginary Beings and its ilk. Because this is a blog, I hope to be able to pull together various quotes, pictures and videos from across the web. I’ll also be attempting to illustrate each entry myself.

When I’ve done a few more I’ll collect them on a dedicated web page, but for the time being they’ll be categorised under “Figments” here, with the first three entries appearing below. I hope you enjoy them.

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Reprobus

Figments: A Bestiary Comments Off

Jul 222011

Medieval Europeans believed in many strange peoples inhabiting the uncharted lands beyond the edges of their maps. The medieval conception of the world would have been of a charted haven surrounded by boundless strangeness. Living in the far distance were all manner of wonderful civilizations: the one-legged people, the people whose faces looked out of their chests, and the people with the heads of dogs.

It’s impossible to be sure of how these stories originated. No doubt they’re due in part to a fear of the unknown, to medieval man’s sense that Christendom was an island in a sea of heathens and demons. More charitably, it’s possible that explorers simply made up such peoples, knowing full well that their audiences at home would never be able to disprove their claims. Such explorers would have known, too, that often a little bit of fiction makes life more fascinating. There’s also a theory that travellers mistook certain animals for men. In the case of the dog-heads, it’s possible that explorers saw baboons or lemurs and thought they were types of human being. At Wild Film History you can watch David Attenborough talk about the indri…

Wherever he came from, and regardless of whether or not he was actually a lemur, Reprobus was a dog-headed man who converted to Christianity and found his way to the city of Antioch. Upon his conversion he took the name Christopher (now St. Christopher), but swiftly ran into trouble with the dastardly Emperor Decius and his henchman Baceus.

There came a certain Baceus to him and struck him. “You may do so”, said Christopher, “for I will not strike you in return, but I forgive you, for forgiveness is the new law.” 3. Baceus went to the king, and said: “Hail O King, I have news for you. I have seen a man with a dog’s head on him, and long hair, and eyes glittering like the morning star in his head, and his teeth were like the tusks of a wild boar. I struck him for he was cursing the gods; but he did not strike me, and said it was for the sake of God that he refrained.

- from the Irish Passion of St. Christopher, presented by David Woods of University College Cork on his website

After this episode, Decius summons Reprobus and tries to force him to sacrifice to the gods of the city. When Reprobus refuses, Decius employs hooks, burning lamps and – most feared of all by the church at the time – pretty women, to try to break his resolve. Although Reprobus never made the sacrifice, by the end of the story he has had enough of turning the other cheek. Decius is worn out too, and has Reprobus beheaded, but not before the saint invokes an angel to, ‘give to Decius a devil to compel him to gnaw his own flesh and so die.’ And so, nobody lives happily ever after.

A disclaimer – this is not the version of St. Christopher’s story that most present-day Catholics would recognise. At some point in history, the legends surrounding Christopher and those of the dog-headed people became entangled. Since then the two have been separated, and Reprobus cut loose as an unwanted anomaly of religious history. Perhaps it is fitting, after all. The name Reprobus translates as Outcast.

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Muirgheis

Figments: A Bestiary 1 Response »

Jul 222011

Lady Gregory, she of W B Yeats fame, recorded the following passage in her book on Irish folklore (you can read an online version of it here).

…and Eochaid was drowned with his children; and the water spread out into a great lake that has the name of Loch Neach to this day. But Liban that was one of Eochaid’s daughters was not drowned, but she was in her sunny-house under the lake and her little dog with her for a full year, and God protected her from the waters. And one day she said “O Lord, it would be well to be in the shape of a salmon, to be going through the sea the way they do.” Then the one half of her took the shape of a salmon and the other half kept the shape of a woman; and she went swimming the sea, and her little dog following her in the shape of an otter and never leaving her or parting from her at all.

- from A Book of Saints and Wonders by Lady Gregory

This is reminiscent of a Catalan fairy story, The Girl-Fish, recorded by Andrew Lang, in which a girl is transformed into a salmon. Of course there are countless folk stories about people who go to live in the sea, or about mermaids and mermen, supposed by some to have originated from sailors’ sightings of mammals with fish-like characteristics, such as the sea cow.

Then she told him all her story, and how it was under the round hulls of ships she had her dwelling-place, and the waves were the roofing of her house, and the strands its walls. “And it is what I am come for now” she said “to tell you that I will come to meet you on this day twelve-month at Inver Ollorba; and do not fail to meet me there for the sake of all the saints of Dalaradia.” And at the year’s end the nets were spread along the coast where she said she would come, and it was in the net of Fergus from Miluic she was taken. And the clerks gave her her choice either to be baptized and go then and there to heaven, or to stay living through another three hundred years and at the end of that time to go to heaven; and the choice she made was to die. Then Comgall baptized her and the name he gave her was Muirgheis, the Birth of the Sea. So she died, and the messengers that came and that carried her to her burying place, were horned deer that were sent by the angels of God.

- from A Book of Saints and Wonders by Lady Gregory

There are various sites in the British Isles where mermaids and other sea maidens were supposedly brought ashore and baptised/buried. Although it sounds incredulous, in the sixteenth century there were in fact a fair few mermaid corpses in circulation. Those same sailors who’d fantasised about manatees were still inventing monsters when they reached the shore. Sailors would carve and varnish the bodies of dried skates and rays to create freakish figures known colloquially as Jenny Hanivers (read a good Time Magazine article about it here). These could be presented to superstitious landlubbers as the bodies of sea saints and girls of the deep. The rewards could come in the form of hard cash, or simply the fun of a well-executed practical joke.

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The Barometz, or The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

Figments: A Bestiary Comments Off

Jul 222011

For in his path he sees a monstrous birth,
The Borametz arises from the earth
Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,
A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit,
…It is an animal that sleeps by day
And wakes at night, though rooted in the ground,
To feed on grass within its reach around.

- Dr. De la Croix, in Connubia Florum, Latino Carmine Demonstrata (1791)

This plant bears a crop of cute little lambs. It is therefore the go-to fruit tree for hungry wolves. Sadly, in order to survive, the lambs need to remain attached to the umbilical stems of the plant and this means that, once they have nibbled away all the grass within reach, they starve to death. It’s an unfortunate and fleeting existence, belonging to one of the most absurd creatures ever invented.

The Vegetable Lamb’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the Golden Chicken Fern may have provided the basis for the Barometz, but I expect that this one is just too far-fetched to have any grounding in reality.

In the splendid book Beasts! Kaela Graham contributed a fantastic illustration of the Barometz. Also check out his unpublished version.

If you haven’t got Beasts! or Beasts! Book Two, I’d highly recommend that you rectify the situation. They’re collections of, well, beasts, as depicted by various comic book artists and collected by Jacob Covey for Fantagraphics. Each picture comes at its subject from a fresh angle, and nothing is depicted in the way you might expect (the mermaid in the second volume springs to mind).

Jorge Luis Borges included the Barometz in his Book of Imaginary Beings, where he referenced other plants that behave like animals, namely a bird-eating plant imagined by G K Chesterton, the trees in Dante’s forest of self-murderers, and the crying mandrake, as recently seen in Guillermo Del Toro’s masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth (here shown relaxing between takes).

In the ocean there is a creature that really is a plant-animal hybrid. Whereas leaf insects, stick insects, and these fern-like creatures found in the Antarctic merely look like plants, the Green Sea Slug has performed the trick of the Barometz in reverse, and become part-vegetable.

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Fields, Otters, the Saints

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Jul 142011

Just wanted to share with you the good news that my hero of 2009, William Elliott Whitmore, has a new record coming out this month. Check it out here.

I also wanted to share a little teaser of something I’m hoping to post next week. A new project for this blog. If you can guess the link between saints, dogs, otters, salmon, lambs and Tartary, then you know what it is already.

Muirgheis preview

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