Ahhhh the class of ‘09. Sometimes a good year, sometimes not so much. I look back on these guys with mixed feelings but a huge amount of happiness and joy.

I’ve been thinking about ex-students and the Book Draw a lot over the past couple of weeks. I’m coming up to the final months of, possibly, the last classes at my workplace and a number of students have been asking if I’ll miss them. Spoiler warning: (I will) and who knows what will happen in the future. I do know that some of the guys and gals I have worked with this have have been entertaining an fun to be with.

Which leads me to these guys: the class of ‘09 Big Book Draw version. It was a wonderful day (click on the Guildford Book Draw tab to the right for more details) but a project that often nearly broke me. For a start I had huge dreams – as with any project – and I really must learn to stop doing that. One of the dreams was to have a launch party with a difference. I made forty copies of the book (and since each copy took at least an hour to make that’s a fair chunk of time when times always a pressing). The idea was to have a night out where people who had helped on the day could be given their copy of the book at random. The next step on this project is to wrap each book in brown paper and post them to recipients and give them to those more local. It was a lovely plan. Added to that I wanted to have a storyteller there on the night to read out the story of the Dragon and his Princess and the Fish’s Library (a story I’m quite pleased with ) and it would all be lovely.

Of course it wasn’t to be. I tried but hey ho, some dreams fly too high and the reach of my net feels very limited. But I do still intend to send the books off to people, at random, and with a bit of luck the people who receive them will photograph themselves and their book and email that back to me. Then, and only then, will I know who got what.

It’s been a funny old road but one that’s kept me amused through some dips last year. Now I’m onto the semi-sequel (Wombat and Wambot) which, again, is a youth work venture and, again, will be drawn by teenagers who I’ve yet to meet and can’t wait to do so, and hopefully I’ll look back on the project in the Summer as I wrap it up and smile as much as I do with the mini-books above. We’ll see. I’ve yet to learn to stop dreaming but, since the dreams help me with the ideas in the first place I can hardly complain when the rough goes with the smooth I suppose.

In other news the final, FINAL copy of Sylver went of to the publisher today for print and release in early May. More on that when I have the time to type but youth work calls for tonight so it’s time to plod onwards on a different path…

One of the things I’ve been working on, well, two of them actually, comes to leave my hands and go to the hands of others soon enough.

The first, Dr Sylver and the Tapestry of Time, hits shelves in April after the most protracted birth of any of my projects, ever. Oh boy.

The second hits shelves before hand, despite only having been worked on since Christmas in any real sense. It’s been a theraputic piece of work in some ways, exciting in others. Ladies and Gentlemen meet Wombat and Wambot. It’s the tale of a small, furry amnesiac and his large robotic counterpart. Fairly obviously the name came first and the story… Well, there’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that in there. Sometime soon it becomes my own and then, shortly after, it’s going to be given over to others: much like the Big Book Draw the fun of Project Wombat is that others will fill in the middle up until the last page or so. That part will be the most fun of all. I had intended to show the project off sometime in the Summer but with the release of Brushes on the iPad in a months time it makes more sense to try and hit before then which has compressed my stretching out and relaxing time to a small, stressed ball of lack of time off. Still, I do love working on a project so hey ho, all part of the game.

Anyhow if you’re so inclined you could join the twitter feed at @wombatwambot or add the facebook page here… The more the merrier (and of course the more would help me out in showing the project off to others in the future so any adds would be gratefully appreciated).

One of my mates has just had a double eye operation so I did this card for her to take the shades off to.

I… um… probably don’t have to say what software I used to draw it with?

‘Twas explaining the brushes feature in Pixelmator to one of my students and this came out of it (well, 50% of it did, I finished it off a little while ago). Modern art? How about bids start at $500,000 thank you very much.

In other news: going to the leaving do of two more colleagues tonight. I don’t think this day is going to end well… We’ll see. Straight from that to youth group so I’m now booked in for the next 14 hours.

I think this may be the project I go onto after Zombies and Wombat. Maybe… It’s certainly grabbed my bonce for the moment but hey, things do that.

In other news had some kind comments after I posted a somewhat sombre Facebook comment earlier, being cold and wet and having walked for an hour in the rain to have a bookshop tell me they didn’t want to have a look at samples of Sylver 3. Am warm and dry now, so two of the three issues are now fully resolved so, hey, it’s not all bad. And the positive comments always make things roll a little smoother. Have picked up a couple of hours more at college too, which I don’t have time for but could do with the money, so again things not so bad I guess. Onwards, anyway, albeit to sleep now.

Friend of mine is going in for an eye operation on Thurs hence the desire to do a get well soon card. This makes more sense to the person it was sent to but you’ll have to take my word for it that it probably raised a smile. If you’re so inclined prayerful thoughts on Thursday would be appreciated, by me more than her, but hey, it’s still good to keep these things in mind.

Sign: Now entering Convoluted Central.

Ext shot of train slowing gently before stopping. Steam comes from the wheels. Slightly confused orange haired person steps off train and onto platform, watching and waiting and wondering what’s out there in the cold, dark, city he’s stepped onto…

Ahem, by which I mean, yet another step of the bizarrely tortuous journey of the third Dr Sylver book is upon me and therefore you, as I’m going to blog it to pieces.

So, the story so far. Five years ago (really only that short a time? Yowsa) I write a book, give it to youth groupers and enjoy the fact that they like it. Weekly they end up nagging me to get it published (because, yes, it is as easy as that) and in the end, after sending it to a number of places, Highland books publishes Dr Sylver and the Library of Everything. Reviews are better than I can ever have hoped for, especially as I only expected people to have a go at me for clumsy writing and typos (‘better than GP Taylor’ one lovely person said, ignoring the fact that it probably wasn’t – but thanks Phil, it was a high point – and sales wise I don’t think I was ever anything other than an amusement between the camps).

Then, over the next four years I write the sequel, Dr Sylver and the Repository of the Past – which again is reviewed well but less so as a sequel rather than as a computer games artists first book – create the Exile Road for Spring Harvest and Messenger for DLT. Somehow I manage to accidentally begin a fight with Bear Grylls in the pages of a religious newspaper which fortunately never spilled into the realm of him burying me up to my eyelids in limestone. It’s been an interesting journey and I can now exit my house without looking out into the bushes to check for movement before I start running off to work, just in case.

And then I wrote Dr Sylver book 3: The Tapestry of Time.

Oh boy has this project not been smooth. Not really any one fault per se, problems with the ending here, missed print windows there, distributor goes bust, original cover files lost in a hard disc explosion, incorrect files sent to print etc etc. Highland sent off for a sample collection of books before Christmas and, one way or the other, they turned up this week. Not to mention life in all its fullness distracting events. From serious illness in the family to redundancies and so on it’s been… Well, it’s a book all on its own.

But today I picked up a box of advance copies of Dr Sylver 3 and it’s fun to just see them in the flesh. They’re not the final FINAL copies – one more scan through has shown of about 100 areas where a couple of trimmed words make a much larger impact than would be first thought but this time it’s tangible, in my hands. DSTT exists and is getting there.

Anyhow, three hour meeting today was… interesting. We’ll send copies out and beg reviews here and there, write articles and all that jazz. All the stuff a micro publisher and a barely known author have to do to make themselves noticed in a world of louder loudspeakers and marketing budgets that don’t resemble a coffee budget. Hopefully DSTT will be read and enjoyed and all that work and hassle and issue and upset will have been worth it. The first couple of reviews have already been lovely and, personally, I think it’s the best ending I’ve written… So we’ll see.

Anyhow, if anyone lives next to Simon Mayo and doesn’t mind delivering a cake and copy of the book then by all means pop me a mail (some things I’d love to achieve in life – though I suspect I never will – including having Mayo and Kermode saying ‘and hallo to Paul Kercal, loved the book,’ having something linked on Adbuzeedo’s Daily inspiration site and having the Wombat comic liked by any of the guys I admire and respect in the comic book field. I am to dreams and hopeful fantasy what Icarus was for altitude…)

Righto, onwards, loads to do and times a wasting.

Which came with love from wifey. I’m hoping that this is going to be a regular series

Causing myself a slight qualm concerning the Wombat project here’s a comparison between the textured and untextured versions of the Little Wall of Bethlehem pic. (I say a qualm as, so far, Wombat is untextured but I may change my mind on that… Hmm… decisions decisions…) Anyhow the workflow on this one was: idea at 11am, doodling (while having coffee with family – they’re used to my, ahem, multitasking when a picture takes over) between 12.30 and 1.30, finished between 4 and 5 including textures. It wasn’t intentional to get the image done so speedily, sometimes I just like to see where somethings going fast. Normally I doodle something out on the screen in Brushes and then whack it down to a low opacity and draw a new version of the outline and then repeat the process until I’m happy with it. This time the outline I doodled was the one I stayed with (with one small change – the original picture had a searchlight on it so was going to be a dusk like image – as soon as I started colouring I wanted to do it slightly bluer sky so the searchlight went). Then I coloured it and then it was into Pixelmator to be textured.

Saw some images of Bethlehem courtesy of a friend who worked over there for the past year. The pictures painted a truly sad and demoralising story better than the (excellent) conversation and this doodle sprung to mind pretty much complete as we chatted. Followed it up since and here it am. The image is not a comment on the rights or wrongs, which side is worse than the other or anything like that because it’s easy to make rash statements without understanding the situation. Then again with something like this who does understand it?

Brushes, hour and a half followed up with 40 minutes in Pixelmator adding texture and tone.