(click to zoom)

Every time we get a new topic for the storyblog I try and find something from my own experience or something I have already produced to use for my entry. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been on a boat recently and the only image I had of the sea and a boat was from one of my Robinson Crusoe illustrations, which I have already used on here, so I decided I would try and sketch something to do with the A Boy and  Bear in a Boat.

I haven’t yet read the book (but I really like the cover), so I thought I would literally take the title and illustrate that. I kind of had in mind that I wanted to do it more as a character sketch. I have a photo of myself (taken in Scotland a couple of years back) which I always thought looked like someone peering into the distance from the mast of a ship, So I decided to do the character in that pose, only from the front.

sketch of the boy

original photograph (taken in scotland)

So I sketched out the boy in a paddling boat with a teddy bear in his shoulder pack. but it didn’t really feel finished so I started doodling around it, until there was not only a boy and a bear in a boat…there was now also a map, a compass, a pipe, a book and even a tea stain (from the cover).

Richard Collingridge is an illustrator and concept artist.  He has previously worked on the covers for Trash by Andy Mulligan, The Deserter by Peadar O’ Guilin, and WE by John Dickinson.  Richard’s first picture book, When It Snows, is currently in production.  You can find out more about Richard on his webpage.

I desparately attempted to beg off posting anything this month, claiming to be horribly busy with this comic I’m working on, and also to be possibly the least nautically-minded person in this entire island nation. I think port is left, and I gather that ropes are involved, and that is literally the sum total of my knowledge of or interest in boats.

However, thankfully for us all the indefatigable Tilda at DFB reminded me that, hey, that comic I’m claiming to be so busy working on, has  A LOT OF BOATS IN.

And this is true.

However, and this is quite crucial here, the boats in question make it about three pages into the story before they’re out of that boring old ’sea’ nonsense, and into a milieu I’m much more comfortable with: riding around on the backs of dinosaurs. Read the rest of this entry »

Boats are so much fun to draw. I love keeping lots of little models around me. I got these boats at the National Maritime Museum’s Toy Boats exhibition, that was AWESOME.

I had fun imagining what little characters could look like, having adventures in the boats. Here’s a squid in a submarine! I love my job.

Here was the original toy I looked at: Read the rest of this entry »

Being a bit of a daydreamer is a great quality to have if you’re an author: first time it’s ever come in handy in my life. Generally speaking though, it’s not something you look for in a sailor.

I always have to start any blog posts about the sea and sailing with a caveat explaining that I’m not actually a particularly good dinghy sailor: it’s just something I love.

Oh how embarrassing then to have an entire series of eminent authors (and me) writing posts dedicated to sailing. I’m starting to feel like I’m on one of those radio confession slots now. But, dear reader, I have to admit that I am such an inadequate sailor that it nearly done for me, and another unfortunate.

I’ve blocked most of the details from my mind but suffice to say it was a summer in the 1980’s; I was trying to learn how to be a slightly-less-average sailor courtesy of a UKSA week-long course, and was dutifully tacking across Cowes harbour in a Wayfarer with some poor boy from London.

It had not been an auspicious pairing this young man and I. He was shy, I was awkward, the weather was freezing: we didn’t get off to a brilliant start. And after we’d spent 30 minutes in the mouth of Wootton creek – in the water and the pouring rain – trying (and failing) to right our capsized boat, relations were on the downhill slope.

But what do you know, come the last day the weather turned, we were a bit more confident and things started to feel much better. ‘How lovely,’ I thought to myself as I sat at the helm. It was Dinghy Week and there were lots of other boats on the water, the sun was shining. ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ I expect I was thinking to myself, possibly whilst playing a 1980s tune in my head by way of a soundtrack.

Lovely green water, clear blue sky, I wonder if I’ll get a tan today…

Until suddenly my crewmate’s hand grabbed mine angrily and tacked our Wayfarer violently. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Tilda, you’ve forced me to write about a book I wrote for Another Publisher. Sorry. But sailing it is.

In a previous post, I wrote about doing my research after writing the book; I did the same thing, though while the novel was still in draft form, for THE SANDFATHER (to be reissued this year by A.N.Other, with a striking new cover). The story is set in a fictitious seaside resort called Ryton-on-Sea, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Littlehampton, on the Sussex coast. Hal, my main character, is in all sorts of trouble, having been excluded from school and sent to stay with a great-aunt he hardly knows (by a plot contrivance I won’t go into here). I wanted him to have the chance to try something new and do it well, and that something is sailing.

Well, I’d never so much as set foot on a sailing yacht in my life, and didn’t know a bowsprit from a half-hitch. And I knew that it would be very easy indeed to get things wrong. So I decided it was time for some hands-on experience, and found a company called Firstaway that offered sailing courses for all levels of incompetence.

February wouldn’t have been my ideal time of year, but I had a deadline to meet, so I set off for Southampton into bitingly cold winds and sub-zero temperatures. I’d packed my Goretex walking clothes, which were quickly dismissed as inadequate: instead I was kitted out in a sort of padded boiler suit, which made me feel like Michelin Man. There were five of us on the thirty-foot yacht, and I turned out to be the only novice. Still, it suited my fictional purpose perfectly, because Hal in the story was never going to be an expert: he was having his first experience, just as I was.

We set off towards Portsmouth Harbour and I followed instructions about pulling in fenders, slackening sheets (I bet I’m getting it all wrong – this was a few years ago now … ) and did some tacking and jibing. All very exciting. Even more excitingly, once we headed out into the Solent, I was allowed to take the helm, while the yacht heeled over at 45 degrees and other people saw to the jibing and the tacking. I managed to steer into Cowes Marina without mishap.

We slept on the yacht, mooring at Hamble on the second night, and going up the Beaulieu river to Buckler’s Hard. Here I lost points for becoming so interested in the birdlife sheltering along the shores that I asked someone else to steer, while I gazed out with binoculars. This was definitely disapproved of by my otherwise tolerant instructors. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahoy there, and a Happy New Year to ye!

Over the next 2 months, the storyblog is going to be awash(ho ho) with nautical tales - of sea, sand, salty air, and sailing!   Last week, we published A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton and Heart of Stone by Melanie Welsh, and next month we’ll be releasing The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan.  Although very different, all three titles share some common ground: a journey over water, a harbour town with magical history and Selkie legend.  That’s right, all three stories take place in, on and besides the sea!   So, the DFB Storybloggers – authors and ilustrators all – will be sharing their thoughts, memories and ideas based on the seaside – these might be photos, jokes, artwork, prose…  We’ll have to wait and see.   Watch out for the first post from Linda Newbery this Thursday!

Making up locations is one of the joys of writing fiction, but sometimes you come across somewhere real that is just perfect as a setting.  And real objects can set you off on a line of storytelling that could never have started in your own brain.

It’s happened to me many times: most recently when I was writing my book Johnny Swanson.  I was investigating the early history of the disease Tuberculosis when I came across a place in Wales called Craig-y-nos.

It’s a castle built mainly in the 19^th century, and in its heyday it was the home of a great opera singer.  But the thing that caught my attention was that it had been used, from the 1920s to the 1950s, as a sanatorium: a special hospital for children with T.B.

I had to go and have a look. Fortunately, the castle was being converted into a hotel, and it was possible to stay there (albeit in a room where you could see down into a courtyard through a hole in the bathroom floor). Read the rest of this entry »

They say “worse things happen at sea”. But what if you are at sea?
What if you’re at sea in a tiny boat with a big smelly bear? And the only food you have left is a sandwich that is so old and mouldy that it glows in the moonlight? And the bear says something about sea monsters but you just don’t know whether he’s joking or not?

Yes, what then? Well, one of the things that you might not expect to come out of such a predicament is wave after wave of laughter. But Dave Shelton has managed to do just that. A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is a book like no other; a story which, in its bare bones, could be utterly bleak: a young boy is lost at sea, with no compass, no food and (seemingly) no chance. But Shelton’s masterful prose transforms this premise into a brilliantly funny and tender tale of friendship. While some of life’s problems are beyond our control, others may seem less worrisome if only you have a cup of tea, a ukulele and a bit of wishful thinking.

This book is rather different from anything we have published before. It is over three hundred pages long and Dave has illustrated it throughout, with several pages of beautiful full colour.

The unique humour of the story also meant that it was tricky coming up with the right cover look. Read the rest of this entry »

Well! I never expected that one of the best stories of 2011 would come out of The Archers.

Should there be anyone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, The Archers is a Radio 4 soap opera (‘an everyday story of countyfolk’) that has been running since 1951.

The Archers moves at a snail’s pace.  Only those of us who have devoted most of our lives to listening regularly can detect the crucial lines in each episode – and yet you can miss the programme for weeks and still pick up the threads.  We love some of the characters, but the programme’s real contribution to the welfare of the nation is the way in which it provides a safe place for us to hate.  I could never dislike anyone as much as I dislike Helen Archer.  In a curious way, by sucking away at my store of bile, she (and other infuriating characters, such as the vet’s father, Jim Lloyd) make me better able to cope with people I find irritating in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

DFB Story Blog whip-cracker Tilda (pictured right) has requested us Storybloggers to write about our favourite stories of the year.

Well that’s a really tough call for this author who’s read (and LOVED) gazillions of stories this year.

So I thought ’twas more like the season to wax nostalgic for all those stories I have adored in Christmases past.

This past year there has been some controversy about school reading schemes vs ‘Real Books’ … but growing up in the Philippines at a time when there was hardly any local publishing for children, I discovered many of my favourite stories in reading schemes. These were imported from the United States and so featured no Filipino characters whatsoever (but that’s another story) … so it was all fantasy to me.

My Christmas favourite was a short story that never failed to bring a tear to my eye called A Tree for Nick by Mary Lou Brown (originally published in 1959).

A Tree for Nick was about a brother and sister decorating a tree for a Christmas tree competition. Except they couldn’t help thinking about their eight year old brother Nick, who was blind.

So they left out the shiny, sharp edged foil stars and the electric lights that burned Nick’s hand when he accidentally touched them last year. Instead, on went the soft fuzzy sheep and candy canes and the old horn that hooted when you blew it and the old tinkling music box. The tree they ended up with wasn’t pretty – but you could feel and taste and hear it.

‘Wheee!’ breathed Nick, his face shining with happiness. ‘This is the prettiest tree I’ve ever seen!’ Read the rest of this entry »