ARTWORK: Self Portrait #1

Painted 21/04/15.

This is the first self portrait I've ever done, and it was so weird because it meant not only did I have to stare at my own face for a good few hours, but I had to work really hard to create an accurate representation of myself.
It appears quite pinkish because I painted it from a photo I took in my room - I have purple curtains and they were closed at the time. Plus, my skin is quite reddish in hue anyway!

ARTWORK: Sunset Over St Helens

Painted 14/04/15.

This one looks a lot more rough - the whole thing was wet-on-wet as I was painting late at night and didn't want to wake everybody up with the hairdryer!
Featuring the industrial skyline of St Helens circa 2012, as viewed from the Grange Valley area of Haydock.

ARTWORK: Late Sunset

Painted 14/04/15. This is a painting of a very late sunset from a photo I took just down the road.

I used a clean, dry 2" house brush on the background to achieve a gradient, working in dark blue, sky blue, tiny amounts of green, then yellow and orange until it looked smooth.
Clouds were a varying mixture of light pink, orange and brown, using a wet-on-wet technique to blend them in.
My original photo doesn't have the sun in it, but I thought the painting would look better overall if it was featured.

ARTWORK: Slieve Donard From Murlough Beach

Painted on 12/04/15. This is a redo of an old painting I did back in 2010, but never finished.

Took me ages to figure out how I could get decent looking pebbles on the beach when it occurred to me: gab a fistful of cotton buds, dab them in grey paint that had been mixed so it looked marbled, and slam 'em on the canvas!

ARTWORK: Night Sky #1

Painted on 14/03/15, the first acrylic painting I've finished in about four years.

I used sponges to create the effect of nebulas/space dust, and a piece of penne pasta for the finer stars because it was the narrowest point I could find!

I AM REAL! (& some exciting news!)

I'm still alive! Feels like I preface a lot of my journal entries with that statement... but still! I'm back with a long post for you all!

Finally, I have a computer back. My dad was kind enough to set up a desktop PC for me in my bedroom. PC means Scrivener, Scrivener means being able to organise the novel much more efficiently! Yay!

As a result I'm taking a break from writing anything new, while I transfer my manuscript scene by scene into Scrivener. It's so incredibly useful - you can have index cards featuring the synopsis of every scene, so you can see an overview of the entire plot and just drag and drop stuff to rearrange them. So much easier than cutting and pasting scenes in OpenOffice and praying to your chosen higher power that you don't muck it up and lose a couple thousand words somehow.

Having my computer back also means I can change the layout and style of this blog a lot more easily. It's been crying out for some tweaking for some time; I want to change it to accommodate the blog's new dual purpose - to keep all 0 of my fans updated on my writing and my artwork too.

That's what I'm here to talk about mainly, my artwork. I hadn't really wanted to talk about it much in case I jinxed stuff but 1) I'm too excited to keep my gob shut and 2) I've realised lately that when I wanna talk about stuff, I should just fucking talk about it instead of skipping around it in case of imaginary curses and whatever!

I've been focusing a lot on my art lately. Took up painting again after about... *counts on my fingers* four or five years? I'm pretty skilled with pencils and pens, but had always been terrified of working again with paint because it wasn't my main thing (I was always "the biro kid" in my art lessons at school) and because it's kinda different as mediums go.

But there were certain things that could be quickly done in acrylics that would take me a bazillion years to do in pen. Case in point, pictures of the night sky. I'd tried a few times to do something in pen that looked good, but inevitably looked like a load of black ink scribbled on so heavily that it tore the paper, with some tiny white circles dotted about.

So, in March, I dug out my old paints and some old canvas board that had been sitting looking forlorn in my room. Lit some incense up, made a cup of tea, stuck some music on... and I painted.

Since then, I haven't really been able to stop. Sometimes the day job gets in the way, or I'm not at home. I'm terrified of painting while at my fiance's in case I get a tiny spot of paint on his mum's table. I'm sure she wouldn't kill me but I've always had a thing about leaving the tiniest bit of mess in another person's house, even though my house is a trash heap. But yeah, apart from when those things have been stopping me, I've been painting a lot. I'll post the paintings I've done soon, but for ease of navigation around my blog I'll post them in separate entries, all tagged nicely.

I suppose this sudden explosion of painting came about when I realised, during my night sky piece, that painting wasn't at all as terrifying as The Biro Kid in me had thought it to be. It was actually really fun and hey, I was actually creating a night sky I was happy with! And some of the skills I'd picked up working with pen and pencil all these years still applied! I've had three really important realisations lately:

1.  I create art, therefore I am an artist.
2. Allowing myself to get messy? It's fucking liberating, man.
3. Also liberating? Giving myself permission to suck. Because that is how I learn. 

All this painting will come in handy, though, because on the 23rd of May I'm taking the overnight ferry crossing back to Northern Ireland! Why is this important, I hear you ask? Well, this is actually the thing that I didn't wanna blog about at first in case of imaginary jinxes and stuff. 

The main reason for my visit, it goes without saying, is to visit my lovely Mum. I haven't seen her in a little while so the itch to return home was there anyway. Lately, though, she's been struggling with depression. When I heard that, I decided I really had to go, to see if I could help.

But there's another reason. My stepdad, Geoffrey, has the most random assortment of friends - and amongst these friends is an artist called William Mulhall. He rose to prominence after doing some work for Led Zep back in the 1970s, and since then he's painted portraits of all kinds of people - Bob Dylan, Seamus Heaney, John Lennon... He's involved with Game of Thrones, too, what with parts of being filmed over there - I think he's an extra, as are his sons, and I believe they were involved with the building of a longship for the show too? 

A year or so ago, Geoffrey had the idea to show William some of my work - and somehow he was impressed. Next thing you know, Geoffrey has this guy on the phone to me, this Actual Real Artist™, and he's talking to me for an hour or so about art and slowly unpicking my very soul through just a phone conversation, and I'm just sat there like holy shit is this for real how does he know that I'm a super reserved introvert with no self esteem and yeah. Terrifying, but enlightening.

It was after that call, where William told me to believe in myself, that I was an Actual Real Artist because I created art and, while unpolished, it was good art (a massive compliment coming from someone like him), that I realised something important. I was the main thing holding me back. Subconsciously, I'd figured that because my work sometimes looked a little wonky, and I was pretty much unknown, that it wasn't worth trying to put my work out there. I'd always been comparing myself to other artists and feeling down because my work wasn't something you'd ever see in a "HOLY SHIT THESE LOOK LIKE PHOTOS BUT THEY'RE ACTUALLY PAINTINGS" Buzzfeed article. 

So yes, Geoffrey is eager to bring me to meet this guy. Hopefully - fingers, toes and kidneys crossed - an actual, in-person meeting with this guy where I can show him some of my artwork and talk to him about it will be a big step forward. He's apparently interested in moving towards selling some of my stuff, and I'm sure that he'll be able to give me some pointers on my work and shaping my identity as an artist. I'm so excited! You bet I'm gonna be painting like a maniac between now and then!

... when I get more white paint, that is. Heheh. 

How Terry Pratchett and Daevid Allen Inspired This Aspiring Writer

I realised last night that it's been a while since I used this blog - and I thought it might be a good idea to come back paying tribute to two of my great inspirations, while I've had a couple of weeks to collect my thoughts on them.

Sir Terry Pratchett passed away on Thursday 12th March, after a long battle with Alzheimers in which he fought valiantly. I was reeling - I know it sounds awfully odd but Sir Terry was one of those people who, despite being ill, I kinda expected to live on forever. It's strange, I know. I just never expected to finish my shift at work that day only to be told that he had passed away.

A day later, I woke up to the news that Daevid Allen, founding member of Gong, had passed on. He'd had cancer, it had spread to his lung and he had opted to stop treatment - in order to live out the rest of his days more comfortably, I suppose.

And I know I'm still writing my book and the world hasn't seen any evidence of it yet so this entry may not have quite the impact on people, but I feel I still need to write it because Sir Terry and Daevid were two crucial inspirations of mine, without whom the book may have never been conceived - and without whom it may not have survived past the year 2011. But more on that in a bit.

I started writing "The Great Couch Happening of '69" (shortened to "Couch" on here because I'm lazy) back in 2009, when I was going through a pretty dramatic change in the direction I wanted my writing career to go. I'd been writing semi-seriously for many years before that, and everything I did write was my idea of rather dramatic, serious fantasy - not "serious" as in "good", "serious" as in "no room for humour here, lads, just drama, death and people lamenting their ill luck and crossed fortunes".

Writing this stuff was undoubtedly cathartic as I got picked on a lot in my youth, and I learned a lot about the craft, but as I got older and matured into a pretty mellow person who stopped giving a toss, I realised it wasn't quite right for me any more. A lot of the stories just petered out, something was missing. For the longest time I couldn't quite figure out what it was.

If people were to ask me what gave me the initial idea to write "Couch", I might have referred them to the Caravan song, Winter Wine - but that's not strictly true. Because back when I was in high school, in the year or so before I put those first words onto paper, I picked up a couple of novels by Terry Pratchett in our school library - specifically, The Wee Free Men and The Colour of Magic.

Literally my favourite photo of Sir Terry ever taken.

I read them, I laughed until tears were streaming down my face - this was an experience I had never had with a book, and if I could compare a writer's career to anything cosmic, this was the moment where the second Big Bang happened for me, after I had given up and all the serious fantasy stuff had crunched back down into a shapeless singularity again. Terry's work helped me realise what was missing. I would read Douglas Adams' and Robert Rankin's novels about a year later, and they would add fuel to the fires of creation.

What 15-year-old me concluded upon finishing The Wee Free Men and The Colour of Magic was that they were two of the most fun books I had ever read. I got the feeling that Sir Terry didn't take himself nearly as seriously as wannabe-writer-me did, and his prose was hilarious, and it flowed. I've always been a pretty humorous person (in my own weird way, of course, not everybody finds me funny) and I realised that I just needed to let things go a little bit, let my own sense of humour permeate my writing and my characters.

So yes, though Winter Wine was where the idea came from, the genesis of "Couch" was really only a later stage in a process kicked off by my discovery of Terry Pratchett's work. I feel like Terry really wrote from the soul - he didn't just write what was expected of his chosen genre (like I did back when I was a kid), and he inspired me to do the same. So I decided to let myself go, have fun with my writing, and since then I've had some incredible experiences working on this book.

Daevid Allen, AKA Divided Alien, Bert Camembert, Captain Capricorn, Dingo Virgin, Ja Am...

And then there was Daevid Allen. I'd been listening to Daevid's work for many years, being that he started off with The Wilde Flowers and then Soft Machine, and I discovered his work with Gong in 2011. From there, I went on a mad quest to acquire as many of their albums as I could.

NaNo 2012 and 2013, where I'll readily admit the bulk of my novel was drafted, I spent with Gong's music in my ears, and Daevid's incredible solo work. Daevid was a man who could blend psychedelic, punk and jazz to perfection - it was this heady, freewheeling mix that provided the backdrop to the months where most of my madcap stuff was written. Daevid's music had the kind of atmosphere I wanted my book to have, albeit in written form, full of energy and colour. The bad bout of depression I had in the later months of 2011 nearly killed my novel dead, but I would say that Daevid's music was one of the things that helped bring it back.

Plus, writing aside, the music is just so damn good. I had a hard time listening to any of Gong's and Daevid's albums for a few days after hearing the news that he had passed, but a few days ago I finally put on Floating Anarchy and realised how much I'd missed it.

Just thought I'd close this entry off with a really nice quote about Daevid from The Daily Telegraph:

"Allen revelled in being the court jester of hippie rock and never lost his enthusiasm for the transcendent power of the psychedelic experience. He once remarked: "Psychedelia for me is a code for that profound spiritual experience where there is a direct link to the gods." That he never attained the riches and fame of many of his contemporaries did not concern him."

So yes, thank you Terry, and thank you Daevid, for the inspiration and the motivation. One day I'll have this bloody novel finished - thanks in part to you guys. I hope that what I'm writing is something you guys might have liked.

A Warning to Readers and Writers Everywhere

There's a bit of a situation unfolding on Amazon right now - a user going by the name of "Jay Cute" has been uploading other people's books, slapping their name on them and hoping it will pass as one of their own.

For the past little while I've been scrolling through the pages of search results for "Jay Cute", one-star reviewing them all as the piss-poor attempts at plagiarism that they are.

It makes me really sad to think that somebody could really just take the work of another person and try to make money off of it like that. Authors spend months - heck, even years as I well know - drafting their book, going through the euphoric and frustrating process of shaping it into something readable, drowning their sorrows in their beverage of choice, et cetera... and then you get jerks like this who just disregard all of that and pinch it for a quick buck.

"Jay Cute"'s efforts really are bizarre, though. The stolen books have little to no product description, and the thief has made no attempt to conceal the name of the original author. They've just slapped their name on there somewhere, and more often than not the original author's name is quite clearly visible.

I'm scrolling and scrolling and it's becoming sickeningly obvious that there are quite a few victims of this crime. "Jay Cute" has victimised erotica authors, writers of chick-lit, non-fiction, there are a few covers in there that look fantasy-ish - but like I say, it's hard to tell with the vague or non-existent product description. I get the sense that "Jay Cute" is randomly stealing books to sell, not sticking to a particular genre. The prices vary as well, from about £1 - £6 that I've seen so far.

((Later, after many many reviews in which I began to lose the will to live and started copy-pasting "PLAGIARISM, AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE...IARISM" over and over))

Some of the stuff is downright confusing. They attempted to sell Kaje Harper's "Show Me Yours" (available for LEGITIMATE download on her Goodreads page) as "City of Bones" by Cassandra Clare?? Whuuuuu????

I've also been checking the reviews of other people on there who are calling this individual out and I've seen a few remarking that "Jay Cute" has other pages on Amazon, which probably means that they are going under several different names.

The whole situation just makes me sad. I'm sad that there are people out there who would do this, and I'm sad that Amazon has let so many plagiarised titles slip through to the point where the thief could actually make money off of them. And as a writer who was seriously contemplating going down the self-pub route, it makes me feel nervous and kinda unprotected. What is there out there to stop somebody doing this to one of my books in the future?

I dunno. I just thought I'd get this out there, so that writers and readers alike can become more aware of what this person is doing, and the risks. From what I've heard, people have been e-mailing and Amazon is aware of the situation, so hopefully soon we'll have a result.

People, don't plagiarise. And be wary when buying books online. Might be worth noting that these links probably won't work any more when Amazon resolves this, which will definitely be the best outcome.

Really Rad Roleplayers do Mutants and Masterminds

Mutants and Masterminds © Green Ronin Publishing

I'm not sure if I've written about this on here before, but I take part in a tabletop RPG every month with my roleplay group - the game is a superhero RPG called Mutants and Masterminds, and our particular game is set in the Marvel universe, in the North West of England. Our characters are brought together by a robbery at a bank that they all happen to be waiting in line at, and wind up joining MI13 as a superhero group known as the Liverbirds!

It's hilariously good fun, and more often than not we're all laughing so hard that we can't even roll our dice properly. We've had people falling on their own swords immediately after kicking ass, heroes who would happily bring a building down to stop an enemy despite there being civilians inside, vomit related PR disasters, emotional breakdowns involving bacon sandwiches, and whales using Twitter.

One of our members, the wonderful Laila, has been working hard to write a novel based on the crazy adventures of our heroes, and you can find her blog with all of our updates here. She has a bit of catching up to do because she trekked a part of the Sahara for charity recently but most of our adventures are there!

The players, our characters and their Twitter accounts are...

Me and my girl Indrani Abbott, codename Devi; a young British-Indian witch with a rat familiar called Thelma (go figure!) (@DeviTheMystic)

Anna's character Dr Willow Andrews, whose seductive superhero is the gorgeous Nymph. Due to her using her pheromone powers on everybody in the first session, and then me failing utterly by rolling a natural 1 in my efforts to resist, Nymph has the easily-flustered Devi wrapped around her little finger. She uses super-serum to give her skin a bark-like strength and appearance, and has power over plants and insects. (@woodenNymph)

Rhi plays Facade. Facade cannot remember her own name, has a propensity for punching things, and surprises me every session with her recklessness and disregard for everyone's safety. Even her own. She is hilarious. (@FuryAndFists)

Hannah plays Maeve Maddox, a magician's assistant and skilled telepath who goes by the name of Cassandra. She can mind swap, she enjoys singing in other people's heads, and she really hates the circus. (@CassMaze)

Laila's character Ellis Parker works in a museum by day, but when criminals are afoot she becomes the telekinetic sword-wielding Vixen. She goes between kicking ass and completely humiliating herself, usually one round after the other. (@CodeNameVixen)

Ren plays Iris Layla Caddigan-Yves, an ebony beauty with power over electricity, AKA Joules. She isn't particularly fond of people, and can teleport through the mains if needed, which is awesome! Unfortunately, Joules does not have a Twitter account.

Laura G, one of our newest members, plays a university student who accidentally acquires her powers after a drunken dare goes horribly wrong. Her tweets are golden. (@Distortion_KK)

And we have an enemy played by Katie; Victoria Bramhall, AKA Phreak, who isn't a superhero but is scarily gifted with technology and gave us a run for our money when she decided to go renegade. She will be back... (@PhreakTech)

Last but not least, mention must be made of our brilliant GM Pottsy, who doesn't play a hero as such but he plays our AI assistant, BOB - which stands for Battery Operated Brain. BOB helps us in our investigations, struggles on a daily basis to understand human beings, and ensures that everybody's bowel movements are normal. (@BatteryOBrain)

We have two more members waiting to begin - Jack, one of Hannah's friends, and my good friend of many many years, Laura F. Jack has a character created and ready for introduction, Laura F is still in the planning stages. It's all terribly exciting!

So there you have it! If you would like to get on board and follow this mad adventure, check out Laila's heroic novelisation efforts (seriously, the lass writes so fast to get it all down it's unbelievable!) and our characters' respective Twitter accounts. Some of our characters usually tweet and interact (read: bicker) during sessions. It's a lot of fun!

Book Review: The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Those who know me well also know that it is dangerous to mention the name Patrick Rothfuss around me. His two books are burned, word by word, into my brain. Mention him around me and my eyes go faraway as I begin to gush about him and his blog and the beauty of his prose and how amazing his characters are and how gripping the plot of his Kingkiller Chronicle is and how excited I am for the third and final book in the trilogy and and and...

When I heard that Patrick Rothfuss was releasing a short novel featuring one of the characters from The Kingkiller Chronicle, I was thrilled. I found out that it was about Auri, one of the series' most intriguing characters, and I did several backflips of joy. And then I spotted, available for pre-order on the Waterstones website, a beautiful hardcover edition, SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. I think I died; obviously I can't remember for sure, most likely because I was dead. Somebody was kind enough to resurrect me - probably Jason because he's the White Mage of our group and all - and you're damn right I hurled exactly 1299 pennies at the computer screen.

Obviously it was a pre-order, and so took some time to arrive. I kinda forgot about it for a while because I'm easily distracted. But a few weeks later, a parcel arrived...

It's beautiful!

I haven't been able to read it what with all the NaNo business and busyness, but in the last few days while I'd hit 50k and was winding down, I decided to give this book the read it was crying out for.

And... wow. How do I describe it? It was not what I expected from a book, but exactly what I expected from a book about Auri. Does that make any sense? It's joyous, bittersweet, sad and beautifully strange, and full of the childlike excitement and wonder that endears Auri to so many readers in The Name of the Wind. Rothfuss structures the book so neatly, so perfectly, that Auri herself would be proud.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things is bizarre in that it has no dialogue. Apart from the brief appearance of an unnamed little girl who spots Auri during the book, there are no other humans shown. We see footprints, we hear the clamour of life echoing down from the world above, but Auri is the only person we meet.

It's wonderful. I am a total sucker for unusual books like this. When the writer does well, they are amazing. And here, Patrick Rothfuss has done very, very well indeed, because despite the lack of dialogue and the singular human character, it is such a gripping read. Auri's only company in the Underthing are the various objects she picks up along her journey - sprigs of lavender, jars and bottles, long lost perfumes, broken cogs - and like her, we grow attached to these objects as she seeks to put the world right and find a proper place for them. We feel her pain when things are moved, or seem out of place. We are overcome with fascination as she explores these long lost rooms buried deep in the ground. We quiver with excitement as the days pass by and her unnamed but very much known friend comes closer to visiting.

Also strange is the fact that the book doesn't feature action and conflict on the same level as The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear. But again, because this is a story about Auri, it works. We watch her exploring, and the excitement comes from discovering new places with her. There are terrifying moments such as when she swims to grab the brass cog in The Yellow Twelve, unsettling moments such as when she fears that people might be coming into the Underthing to disrupt her peculiar perfection. On page 77, a short chapter titled 'Hollow', my heart simply broke.

Of course, we have got to look at Nate Taylor's gorgeous illustrations. They're so clean, and detailed - they remind me of something from a fairy story. He captures Auri's innocence wonderfully too, her slight appearance, her cloud of bright golden hair, the vastness and mystery of the Underthing in which she resides. The full-page illustrations are stunning. Some of the pages are 'framed' by what I would describe as studies of some of the Underthing's architecture and it works brilliantly to really draw you in to the setting.

As a voracious reader and aspiring artist and writer myself, this book complete with Nate's illustrations was like tucking into a big, fat strawberry covered in chocolate. Delicious, sweet, the perfect treat that leaves you wanting more. The whole thing together is a work of art in itself; I am so impressed.

I literally do not have any qualms with it. I know that probably makes me a shitty reviewer, but at the same time I'm not the sort to whip problems out of thin air. The only thing I would say is that I definitely recommend reading at least The Name of the Wind before picking up The Slow Regard of Silent Things. It will lose none of its mystery if you do, but a few bits here and there would make a little more sense, and you would probably be a bit more invested in the story having drummed up a bit of curiosity! Plus the series is just awesome anyway. GO. GO AND READ IT.

PATRICK ROTHFUSS PROBABLY TOUCHED THIS PAGE. I CAN'T EVEN