Above: Whilst I do quite like this new color that's come on the scene, Heatwave Grass, I do still rather prefer last season's Green and Pleasant Land.
Below: This third section of "my intended novel" is proving tricky. So I have been typing together all my long hand versions of it, to hopefully better see what it is I am saying and what I am trying to say.
You probably never read that bit at the beginning of a book. That blank page before the chapters start. The bit that says “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. It is of course put there to fend off legal complications. It’s not really true.
You can’t write about something that bears no resemblance to things you’ve experienced, places you’ve been, people you’ve known. Same with actors, developing the roles they play by thinking back on character traits, accents, physical habits, of persons they met. Same with painters. Even Picasso. Especially Picasso. He could paint the other side of an imaginative cubist still-life because he’d looked at it. He wasn’t making it up. Picasso could paint a bull in two or three strokes of the brush, and it be perfect. Because he’d watched them. Many times.
When your small children, anyone’s children, started drawing, it’s usually of mum, with a huge round head. The head is what they got to know first. Scribble-hair usually comes next. Arms and legs come last, as simple sticks, because they haven’t yet figured out what’s beyond the close, cuddled face.
When you see ancient drawings by Native Indians, Aborigines, Inuits, of beings in “space suits, you can be sure they’ve seen them first. There is no other possibility. They didn’t get it from Spielberg movies. Try it. Try to imagine something you’ve never ever seen, which looks like nothing else at all.
So that’s how I’ve spent my 30+ degrees heatwave. Sheltering, plenty of fluids (make mine apple juice), trying to push myself through an already difficult chapter, whilst assuring myself that “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. Yeh, right.
All text and photographs copyright ian gordon craig.
I prefer to write in long-hand at first. The resultant sheets are then edited 2 or 3 times, or discarded altogether, before typing out into a Word document. That's when the more exacting editing begins, and probably sees me printing off some pages so I can walk about the lounge reading them out loud, seeing how the grammar flows.
I think I may have completed the second part of my intended novel, after much pausing and thinking over recent weeks. I like working in long hand at the start. Editing follows, firstly as I type, then many subsequent times as I read it.
I still have no idea about the title, and there are some place names I need to sort out. Every time I make a name up I discover on Google it's a real place. Also, in spite of blue skies today, I am so cold that motivation is hard.
My "activity wall". Last October I returned to my intended novel with a
little more organisation in mind. I have six chapters almost finished.
That would represent the first and second sections of the book. (The
1940s & 1950s). As each chapter is presented as a series of events,
rather than a simple story line with start and end points, it has been a
little tricky including all the parts I want included, in the correct
order. I keep getting stuck on chapters 5 and 6. Or perhaps it’s the
space between them that’s in need of more content.
It would be
fair to say I have been going ’round in circles over this, to the extent
that my "activity wall" would best be named "inactivity".
All text and photographs copyright ian gordon craig.
I have spent the past couple of months preparing for self-publishing an eBook of my poems.
I think the earliest piece comes from the late-80s, but all the rest certainly from 2007 – 2020. However, everything chosen has been re-edited and improved. A lot of my writing used to be basic, stream of conscious stuff that I put on Blogger or sometimes even set to music. Those original posts provided just a starting point to now edit, embellish, or indeed mix together to make new works.
Today, after reading various self-publishing guide lines, I reached that point where all are now “ready to go”.
All text & Photographs copyright ian gordon craig.
I set myself a target and a deadline, and I made it.
47 poems was the idea. (The number 47 has a family history). I had a lot of writing to sift through, much of it was intended for song lyrics, or basic "stream of conscious" pieces from old blogs. It all needed a lot of editing and re-writing. It became 46 poems. (One was rather too vitriolic).
Break now to do some sketching for a while before getting my head around e-book self publishing.
All text & images copyright ian gordon craig.
All text, pros, poetry & artwork, copyright Ian Gordon Craig.