Tag: In the Night Garden

Breaking backs.

January 7, 2010

I think I might have broken the back of the edit.  I have addressed every point the editor reported and now want to print off the ms into hard copy and read it as per a book but with a red pen in hand.  I imagine, that with good luck and a fair wind, I shall have finished and be ready to send it back to London for final comment by the end of next week.  Marketable or not.  Waiting for the answer will be excruciating.

After watching an episode of In The Night Garden, my dose of calm and equilibrium for the evening, I have decided that to escape over the ocean while I wait for an answer is the way to go.  Just me and Upsy Daisy, maybe Iggle Piggle and the Tombliboos,

 

Pinky Ponk

 

all in the Pinky Ponk as it floats on clouds of what seems to be expressed air (farts in more commonplace language).  We shall fly over my little bay outside the window and I shall watch the boats and the gulls, the dolphins and the divers.  We shall fart and dip over Maria Island and return on the crest of a sea-breeze and I shall have ditched my anxiety, like so many farts and noxious ballast, and be ready for as straight an answer as London can give me.

Odd inspiration . . .

December 11, 2009

Sometimes the oddest things inspire, arriving in one’s life at just the right time.  I’m working on the first draft of a fantasy fiction at the moment, entitled The Shifu Cloth.  Part of it takes place in a Far Eastern inspired country called The Han.  My female protagonist, Isabella, meets a character at the time of the Lantern Festival which heralds Spring.  And I wondered what this character should look like . . . clothes, mannerisms etc. I had done much research on China and Japan but the research pressed no buttons.  And then my dearest embroidery  friend gave me a notebook (see left) and suddenly my dilemma was solved.  This was my character . . . except in the story, I have given him glasses.  He needed to appear myopic and studious, as well as inscrutable and I’ve always liked the way occasionally light shines on rimless spectacles, effectively blocking out eye expression.

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In the Night Garden . . . a fantasy

December 9, 2009

I’m a fantasy writer and it was perhaps inevitable that I chose that genre.  Although perhaps more correctly, the genre chose me.  If I look back to childhood, I can see that fantasy and fairytale always played a huge role in my reading and my thinking and play-acting.  As a teenager I moved elsewhere, historical fiction mostly.  But then in my twenties I went to Southeast Asia and as I was travelling on my own, I thought I needed a good book for the single seat in restaurants and on planes (you know, so that people would leave me alone).  I took The Lord Of the Rings Trilogy.  Which sort of took care of my excess baggage and companionship, after all I had Frodo et al to stave off lonliness.

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