• According to WordPress, where I host this blog, it’s national blogging month, in which we are encouraged to post a blog every day. This is not as easy as it sounds. I could just post mindless FaceBook/twitter style comments about what I’ve had for tea, but that seems a total waste of time to me, unless you are trying to get one up on your FaceBook friends by letting them know you are having a much better time that they are.

    So, some days there’s not a lot to write about and there’s real work waiting to be done. There, that’s today’s entry done!

  • I guess all authors who know about it, subscribe to google alerts. You enter your name or the subject you are interested in and once a day Google will tell you if they have found anything new that has been posted about you.

    Ping! I got one this lunchtime. Except it’s not about me. It’s incredibly flattering that people are putting up profiles of me, but they all come from one posting that I can’t change and as these profiles disseminate through the web, feeding off each other, they get it a little bit more wrong on each new site.

    They insist on calling me the children’s author, Hugh Rayner. I haven’t been Hugh since I was three months old. My name got so confusing, I changed it by deed poll over 20 years ago. No one knows who Hugh Rayner is!

    Also, the profile, which has been gleaned from various sites, is of a person I vaguely was and the work I did about ten years ago.

    I guess this is going on all around the world about all sorts of people. Computers putting together profiles about people they know nothing about. Or am I being a bit self-obsessive?

  • What a wonderful thing is a sketchbook. I sat down at my desk this morning with a blank sketch page ready and open on my desk to start my next big project. First, I wanted to go back to my original inspiration. I was delayed at Bristol Airport, it must have been spring 2006, when an idea sprung into my mind.

    I got my little sketchbook out and began to work out the idea. It was probably the coming together of lots of ideas, but at that moment, all the pieces fitted together. I’ve found the original page and here is a picture of it. I think I had recently got into mind-mapping, and this is a great example of how I’ve adapted Mind Maps
    for my own use.
    axel

    My sketchbooks are full of little diagrams like these. What is so great about sketchbooks is that you can see ideas evolving and better still how one improves over time. I’ve skimmed through five or six year’s worth of sketchbooks this morning. I found one tiny, throw away sketch for a couple of characters that must have popped into my head three years ago. I’ve never thought about them again. I looked at the sketch in amazement. Did I draw that? Is that my idea? It’s brilliant. I’ve redrawn it in my current sketchbook to reinforce the idea and keep it up to date. If I wasn’t ready or capable to work on those characters then, I am now, both technically and emotionally.

    Another surprise was my handwriting. This had got progressively worse over the years. I made all sorts of excuses for it. In the last three years I’ve been working on it. I can’t believe how bad it was and how much better it has got. The secret? I’ve slowed down and every now and then I do exercises. When I write something badly, I analyse the letterflow and see what I’m doing wrong and revise the cursive joins of the letters, then see if those revisions work with other words. One or two lettershapes I have changes completely.

    I’m also surprised how much scribbled writing there is in my old sketchbooks. Something must have happened about three or four years ago, because they start to fill up with drawings and mind map diagrams and the scribble writing, which used to fill up most of my sketchbooks, fades out. It was probably the mind maps that did it. I can put that down to Anne Marley, the wonderful Children’s Librarian from Winchester. I was telling her my suspicions about left and right brain learning one night, and how I thought right brain thinkers are positively discriminated against in the education system. The next day she gave me a piece of paper on which was written Tony Buzan’s name and the title of a book on Mind-Mapping
    . The book quite blew me away. Since then, my organising, plotting and planning has been much more structured and understandable. Previously, I scrawled down whatever came into my head, with unreadable writing. It was more catharsis than organisation.

    I’m amazed also at how my drawing has improved over that time, especially since most of that time my illustrations have been done on the computer. Maybe the way I work on the computer has changed the way I think about drawing?

    Still it’s good to know that I’m still going forward and haven’t stopped learning. Now, down to the real work.