Scott Westerfield, more Animals in Stories, Editing, and a Secret Photograph of the JD Field Writing Process

What's your favourite Potter animal? What would be your Patronus? Or your Daemon? What's your favourite Scott Westerfield animal?

I've talked about the appeal of animals in kids books before. It's interesting that it doesn't seem to cross over to YA books that I've seen. There's something about the play of imagination necessary to see the world through the eyes of an animal that maybe stops as we grow up.

Westerfield is my latest discovery. I've just read leviathan.

It's BRILLIANT. Recommended to everybody. It's a re-imagining of the events at the start of the First World War, seen through the eyes of a teenage girl and a teenage boy who get caught up in events. It's fast-paced and action packed, but that's not the best bit.

The best bit is that the Germans have armies of gigantic, walking war machines, while the British have fabricated animals by blending their DNA together. There are enormous, armoured elephantines, and ferocious wolf-tigers. There are jellyfish filled with helium that float into the sky. Best of all is a whale as big as a village, that produces hydrogen in its guts, and floats through the sky like a gigantic airship. This is the best thing ever.

If you've read The Water Book you'll understand why. If you haven't, then read the Water Book. It's free at BARNES AND NOBLE. That's got a whale, and imaginatively depicted animals, as well.

Fortunately Westerfield's work is such compulsive reading that it won't be keeping from my editing for much longer. I've printed Levels 4 onto 70 A3 pages.

Here it is, with the corner of my new noticeboard. The corner has a note about the stories I'm going to write AFTER Levels... I'm currently on page 35 of the edit, scrawling arrows all over everything, and crossing stuff out. Crossing tons out. Lucky I've got plenty more to add, so when it finally gets to you you're not going to feel short changed...
  

Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey and THE INDIE AUTHOR save the bookstore.

Everybody buys their books at Amazon. Borders has gone. Everybody else has gone. Barnes and Noble is fading away.

Are we looking at a world where there's no such thing - beyond college campuses, airports, and places like the wonderful STRAND BOOKSTORE - as a bookshop? I hope not. But at the same time, I owe such a lot to Amazon. They allowed me to publish my stories, find readers, and make more money doing it than if I'd ever gone through a traditional publisher.

As marvellous as it is, though, Amazon is missing something. There will never be a movie scene, like this, shot in an Amazon warehouse.



This is one half of my marvellous, bookstore-saving hypothesis. The other is me.

Or rather, those like me. The Indy Author, publishing on Amazon. A phenomenon that can take pride in being scorned less and less (we're not very full of ourselves). I don't know what the latest stats are, but we sell more and more books every year, and there are more of us, and whatever we do sell, we keep far more of the income than our traditionally published colleagues.

The one thing that we don't have is books on shelves. We don't have book signings, or chances to meet readers (and many of us have tens of thousands) in the flesh. But bookstores can give us that, and in exchange, I think some Indie Authors might be very nice to the traditional bookstores that also sell eBooks. Especially, of course, if the bookstores were run by Hugh Grant, or Kate Winslet.



If they can offer Indie Authors shelf space, or meet-the-reader evenings, book signings, or physical publicity, who knows what Indie authors might give up in exchange. It's the hint of a beginning of an idea. What do you think?

Cover Designer - Guest Post

When I heard J D Field had started writing a series of novels I hoped to get the chance to design the covers, so when the opportunity came about I jumped at it! It was always going to be an interesting project seeing as we live in different continents, but the initial brief soon set my mind at rest. Reading a snippet from the preface I could see that these were going to be exciting books. 

The brief asked for an image of a lake or pond, at night in the countryside with the water being a rich blue colour. And to have the moon and stars reflected in it, and possibly the title. The image was to be centrally located on the cover and possibly vignetted so that it faded out to black. 

I am a walking enthusiast and photographer as well as a graphic designer, so this project was perfect as I set about looking for the ideal lake near to me to photograph an adapt to fit the brief. There are 2 reservoirs nearby. Arlington and Bewl water. I chose Bewl as it is more natural looking and is also close to Bedgbury Woods which also contains a few lakes so there should be plenty of opportunities. Here's some of the original photographs. The chosen one is in the background. The others were lovely shots but contained too much detail. In the end we cropped in on the horizon of the chosen one:

The typeface to be used was also very important and if possible to try and do something a little different with it. I knew of one called Plantagenet Cherokee that had many alternate versions of each letter plus some glyphs of old letter forms and symbols. These could be used to add some character and a sense of history to the covers. This typeface would also be a defining link  and 'brand' between covers in the series. 

After doing some ideas for typographical arrangements of the title, I chose a photograph to work on and emailed JD Field some initial designs.  

It was decided that the vignette idea wasn't really working, instead we opted to extend the image to the edges of the cover but add in a rocky silhouette to the front to keep the shape. After some more to-ing and fro-ing of the design to perfect the balance of the elements and colours, the first e-book cover of The Levels Series was finished. A similar process was followed for Rock anthem and now it is time to start thinking about part 3. What will it be? Well you will have to wait and see... Here's a selection of the changing designs clockwise around the finished printed book

Read more about my walks,  (some of which I do to support the charity Hope for Children), kung fu training and photography at http://hard-walk.tumblr.com/ or follow me on Twitter @ollyeast

Stories Long in the Making

In Britain, book shops with cafe tables in amongst the shelves were unheard of. Twenty one years old, I left and went to live in New York. Barnes and Noble was a marvel. I worked in a restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and every day, on my way back to the Gershwin Hotel, where I lived, I would call in at the enormous store between 22nd and 23rd and read from EMMA WHO SAVED MY LIFE. Sadly the store is now GONE  but the book is still a solid recommendation.
It was in the lovely store on UNION SQUARE, though, that I once saw a woman, so striking, that I had to write a description of her on a napkin.
That was my writing in those days, notes of description on napkins, and scraps torn from paper bags and waitress pads. Eventually I came back to the UK with my stack of descriptions and laboured to find a plot to cram them all in to (plot, oddly, was my biggest struggle in those days). I bought HOW TO WRITE A MOVIE IN 21 DAYS and from it learned the first nuts and bolts of story. I also, incidentally, produced a complete filmscript in 3 weeks, mainly at a table in the Rat and Parrot Park Street, Bristol, between shifts. How proud was I? It was rubbish.
Following on from that, I used the last of my New York restaurant tips to buy a second hand laptop, and used Microsoft Write to produce a short story called 'The Songbirds Egg', which I then recycled into a novel called 'The Cloud Ceiling.' Both of them heavily influenced by ROSAMUND LEHMAN and Lawrence Durrell's incomparable ALEXANDRIA QUARTET.
The stories were lumpily written, heavy on sentiment and awkwardly poetic description. But they had a character called Madeleine, and the description of her face, copied from the New York napkin, isn't bad.
It's not bad, and so, with so many of these things, it will be recycled into Lullaby of Lies. Most of the words I write have an awkward ancestry of some sort, but these - randomly - will be known. These lines will be pared down and will crop up in chapters nine and ten. Hopefully you'll read them there...

She is nineteen, preoccupied, a steep and selfless beauty.

Madeleine's hair is dark and as she talks swings, smooth as glass. The straight grain lightly crossed by paler, coppery strands in lazy half curves, like lines of water snaking across a car window.

Her skin is so pale and her features dark and finely drawn. Thick lashes and clear curving brows. Her face never blurred. Clean lines on white like crisp type on new paper, symmetry like the phrasing of verse.

Her eyes dark, lower lids heavy with strong vertical surface, into the vertical planes of her cheekbones. Lips restrained but tilted upward along the tiny seam between lip and face.

Fine half circles under each eye, and a crease along the middle of each lid. They make her eyes seem even larger, with an extra layer of focus. They make the light in the black ringed irises stronger through her gaze and the whole was even more beautiful.

Madeleine's hair flickered behind her and then twisted under her chin. Squinting, she tried to hold it away from her face. I gathered it in one hand and held it at the nape of her neck. She leant toward me and this was how the photograph was taken. Her hair was very cool, soft, straight as pouring water.