Writing fiction again

I came across a batch of writing I'd abandoned months ago - the first piece I started writing last year, which was about two-thirds novel length when I put it aside to do NaNoWriMo and the OU writing course. I was thinking I really ought to get around to continuing, some time, especially as I hadn't written much else since the OU course finished in May. That night, I got a set of ideas for NaNo '09 (whilst I was trying to get some sleep before it got light outside again, naturally..) so the next day I started a set of notes for those and then picked up the first novel again.

It's part of my series on a post-ecological collapse dystopia. This story takes place many hundred years in the future, and a couple of hundred years after the civil war that formed my NaNo '08 novel. My plan at the moment is to write all these pieces, probably a trilogy but maybe four of them, in first draft, and then edit the first one. Which is really either the second one, because I started it second, or the third, because I only have ten thousand words for it so far and it will be finished third.

As part of the OU course, I had to write a very short item in a factual style, and then again from the point of view of one of the protagonists. The incident I made up was a fatal car crash. My NaNo idea is to take this as a starting point of a novel narrated by the man who was at home when his wife died in the car. One of its themes will be the reality of country living versus the Sunday supplements or the Aga saga romantic novel treatment. I grew up in the country myself, and have a very jaded view of it because of some major incidents (think Cold Comfort Farm but not played for laughs).

I now have a mixture of plot outline, character notes and so on for NaNo, which is plenty for this time of year, especially considering that this time last year I hadn't even heard of NaNo. I am designing a book cover image - just for fun, as an exercise in imagery, and because they can be uploaded to your book notes in your NaNo profile. A friend gave me some home-grown apples, which I needed for an image - the narrator will be making watercolour sketches of them in a notebook, so I was going to do that myself. She very kindly left some of the leaves and twigs on. I also made an apple pie with some of the extra ones, being a bit busy today with conte pastel drawings of sunflowers and plums to do the apples as well.

... and then there was this tidal wave of web design

Things got very busy in the last couple of weeks: new web clients thinking of different things they wanted, and a rush of ideas on my part too. I have been getting random ideas at all hours of the day and night, keeping a pen and paper by the bed so I can write stuff down and then get to sleep afterwards, and having a blast drawing up designs.

I'm trying to bear in mind the spider diagram I drew a month ago: keep asking which things fit in the plan for the next few months and which don't, and don't go off on tangents doing those, or adding in even more stuff. There have been a few bits of fun artmaking in the middle of all the graphics, though, and that is part of the plan.

Group show

I put two drawings in a group show a week ago. They were marked "Not for sale" as I was pressured gently to enter this thing on the spur of the moment and had no idea of pricing, plus I would like to build them up into a series over the next few months and create cards from them.

Interesting: met some really lovely people, both exhibitors and viewers. Some people have strange ideas of pricing: either in the "that must barely cover the materials" and the "what planet are they on?" camps. It's fun helping to decide how to hang a show. It's useful to know how to fill in nail marks on the wall later (fingertip dab of paint, no big brushstrokes or that makes them show up even worse). And so on...

Maybe next time I'll feel I have enough inventory to let something go if someone wants it.

Rushing about and scary spiders

I've been busy over the last few weeks with loads of things, or at least it has felt that way. One of my web designs is coming along in fits and starts as the content writer and I come up with new ideas.

I saw my spiritual director last week and she suggested I make a "spider web diagram" to get a snapshot of what is going on at the moment. The deal is, you put your name in the middle, and radiating lines going out to each role of your life, or project. Then these get further lines to break down into more detail.

I had an A3 piece of paper full of tiny black (spidery!) writing when I did this. Seeing that there was indeed a huge amount of stuff going on has helped me to decide not to take on too many other things, in other words it's a tool towards saying that really difficult short word beginning with "N". I am thinking of using this image as the background on my phone to remind me when I am about to make appointments that will stress me out.

Visionaries

I went to see this show yesterday: Visionaries at Wallspace

It's well worth seeing: they have a Stanley Spencer lithograph from a tonal study of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane; a large oil by Philip Howson, "Legion", which has remarkably robust and active participants and escaping demons; an icon-influenced piece called "Downland Discourse" from Noel White, a huge watercolour/gouache(?) called "Dark Madonna" painted by Norman Adams on losing his mother...

It was inspiring to see so many active (or recent) artists working in the general area of spiritual or religious subject matter - "responses to", rather than straight depiction, in many cases. I am just beginning to find out how many people DO work on these subjects or have some kind of spiritual influence - partly by finding the Airbrushed from Art History series which Jonathan Evens of "Between" is writing, well worth a look: joninbetween.blogspot.com

Life drawing gathering

Yesterday's life drawing did go ahead, after various permutations of models (or not), venue (or not) and time changes. I had one of the best drawing experiences of my life, and took along a friend who hadn't done life drawing in years and raved about how good it was.





We met in an empty house (with permission!) so there was about as much space as possible in Victorian terraced house rooms.







The afternoon was bright but overcast. We had been working in the front bedroom of the house, but suddenly the light went dim in there, so we adjourned to the back of the house, which faced west. There was still some amazing light there and we ended up doing some very contemplative poses for the last session.

Art time

I'm currently hoping for a life drawing session tomorrow - emails have been flying around all day, with varying venues and models and just general chaos - at the moment I'd estimate about a 70% chance that something will happen somewhere.



I've primed a couple of canvases this week: one 40*40 square and one 120*60. The larger of the two is going to be based on a hazy landscape seen from the top of Masada when I went on pilgrimage two years ago. Today I started painting on the small one. This is going to show an image I saw in a guided meditation at the Art and Spirituality Network last year. It's about chalices and green shoots in a stone church, with a lot of pottery shards whirling around. I'm hoping for an eerie light and a strange sense of the surreal and the real, with the little pieces of pot almost suspended in the air. So far I just have some raw umber under-drawing...

One of my friends has just returned from a prolonged period of travel and asked if I was preparing for a show. (!) I think I'll think a bit smaller than that for the time being, being relatively out of practice and having a lot of other stuff to do.

I'm working on some excruciatingly personal writing for a role I'm looking into, hence the retreat into very matter-of-fact details of what I am painting - stand by for a list of the colours on my palette this week....

.. not quite.