David Wyatt has been an illustrator for a good while. Find out more at his ramshackle blog.

The sea is my favourite place to go when I want to relax.  I don’t mind where in the world it is, or what the weather’s like – there is something about the sea that always makes me happy.

I can spend hours, days, weeks, just standing by the shore, watching the waves come and go, listening to them break upon the land.

The sea never, ever lets me down.  It’s always the same, yet always different.  And it’s wonderfully indifferent to my worries.  It just gets on with its own business, coming and going, rising and falling, the tides mesmerising me as I watch.

When I’ve been working too hard, and I need something to wash it all away and make me feel new again, there’s only one place I want to be.

I couldn’t have written Varjak Paw without the sea.  The same with my new book, Phoenix.  I shot these pictures (Polaroids of course!) in different places around the world, as I rested between drafts.  There are pictures from the Atlantic, the Pacific, even the Arabian Gulf…

And now I’ve finished Phoenix, I’m planning another escape to the sea.  I’m looking for somewhere to go that I’ve never been to before, somewhere really beautiful and inspiring.  Does anyone have any suggestions, any favourite places?  Leave me a comment if you do!

SF Said is the author of Varjak Paw (winner of the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize), and The Outlaw Varjak Paw (winner of the Blue Peter Book Of The Year).  He has just completed a new novel for DFB, an epic space adventure called Phoenix. He lives and works in London, but you can read a CBBC Newsround interview with him here, and click here to read an extract from Varjak Paw.

(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.

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.

These images are from The Pirates of Pangaea, a story I’m working on with my writerly colleague Daniel Hartwell for the brand new weekly childrens’ comic The Phoenix. It’s a story I’ve been itching to draw ever since Dan and I were chatting, years ago, and he said the four most magical words in the english language:

“Pirate Ships On Dinosaurs”.

Possibly there are artists who can hear an idea like that and not spend the rest of their lives filled with a burning need to draw it, but I am not one of them.

I dare say I’ve actually learned a (small) amount about boats from working on this story; principally that there is a thing called ‘rigging’, and that there is a LOT of that thing. I hope that people will be forgiving of any wild inaccuracies in my depictions of sailing vessels; I do think I’m getting (slightly) better as I go along, trying to get the endless thousands of ropes vaguely correct rather than just drawing them any old place and hoping it looks okay.

Anyway, we’re really excited about the story and about the Phoenix and I really hope people will check it out and, indeed, subscribe! As a special bonus here I offer a SNEAK PEEK at next week’s instalment, in which one of our characters faces the deadly prospect of being forced to walk the (dinosaur) plank!

Neill Cameron lives in Oxford, writing and drawing comics and daydreaming about giant robots. His first graphic novel, ‘Mo-Bot High’ is out now as part of the fantastic DFC Library series. Neill is currently working on new projects combining dinosaurs, pirates, monkeys and numerous other Things That Are Awesome for new weekly children’s comic The Phoenix, available now!

Neill’s website: www.neillcameron.com

Neill’s blog: neillcameron.blogspot.com

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:

Did you know that one of my first jobs was Ship’s Illustrator for the Cutty Sark? I actually applied to be a rigger – a real career change, with a 12-year commitment! – but they liked the picture on my CV and took me on for my artwork instead. So I’m not sailing around the world working on masted ships, but that is what I might be doing if I didn’t like drawing so much. Here’s a picture of me then, in my Cutty Sark uniform:

Here’s a design I made for one of their gift shop mugs (click on the image to enlarge it):

And a woodcut design I made, after the Cutty Sark caught fire and closed for repairs. Here’s a workman treating one of the planks of the ship’s hull:

Take a look at a couple more toy boats from the National Maritime Museum that I’ve found inspiring:

Here’s a picture I drew one day before I started work. It’s me, painting my boat. It’s just one of the little boats on my bookshelf, but it’s a fine one, nonetheless. I took the name from the film Local Hero, a phrase my dad and I sometimes joke about. (You can see the clip embedded on my blog here.)

Happy sailing, everyone!

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Sarah McIntyre disgusted the world with her first DFB picture book, Morris the Mankiest Monster, but then charmed them with her comic, Vern and Lettuce  which is about sheep and rabbit best friends who live in a neighbourhood very much like her own in south London. Be sure to keep an eye on her website for news, drawings and free activity sheet downloads!

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.

How rude.

He was just in time to prevent us ploughing into the Cowes car ferry. We didn’t swap phone numbers when he left.

So there you go. The only constructive advice I have for you on sailing is that daydreaming is a Bad Idea. Which just leaves time for me to share this joke, much beloved of school children on the Isle of Wight.

Q. What’s brown, steaming and comes out of Cowes backwards?

A. The Cowes ferry

(I’m showing my age a bit here. Because the Cowes ferry is no longer brown, and doesn’t steam any more. It is, however, still big. And it’s still not advisable to daydream whilst sailing near it in a dinghy.)

A Wayfarer (not very big).

The Cowes Ferry (very big).

If you’d like to know more about why I chose to put sailing and the sea at the heart of the Verity Gallant stories, why not read this post on Nayu’s Reading Corner? Thank you very much to Lauren at Random House for arranging and to @nayuleska for hosting.

Melanie Welsh is the creator of Verity Gallant’s adventures in The Mistress of the Storm and Heart of Stone.  Click here to read an extract from Melanie’s new story!

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.

We were very well-fed, with meals produced in the tiny kitchen. It was numbingly cold out on deck; I really needed that boiler suit. By the end, when we moored up at Southampton and I supposed to learn how to tie a bowline or some such, I was frozen into stupefaction and just couldn’t get the hang of it, ending up with coils of rope tangling round my feet. 

It was a most memorable weekend, and I’ve got a certificate somewhere to prove it. If I did another two days, I could qualify as Competent Crew, apparently. Yes, I can definitely see the attraction of sailing: imagine chartering a yacht and setting off for a month or two around the Hebrides! But also, I got a glimpse of the troubles you could get into, as people do who are over-confident. I think I’ll stick at Incompetent Crew.

On the Solent

Linda Newbery has written over 25 books for children and young adults, including Set in Stone, which won the  COSTA Children’s Book Prize. Last year, DFB published Lob – a beautiful story about journeys, garden magic and growing. You can read what Linda has to say about Lob on her author page and in the Guardian feature.

Look around Linda’s website here.

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!

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).

I haven’t been back since, but a couple of years ago, the wonderful thing about Craig-y-Nos was that much of its old medical infrastructure was still in place.  If you signed up for the ghost tour, you got to see dilapidated old wards throbbing with atmosphere. When I got back, it was easy to picture the place in which my hero, Johnny, lived out a key part of his story (I’m not going to tell you too much, because I want you to read the book, which I know you WILL!)

Craig-y-Nos is an extraordinary place.  It’s set in breathtaking countryside in the valley between Brecon and Swansea.  These days you have to get there by road (my poor husband got black marks on his licence and a fine for driving at 36mph on the way) but in its heyday, Madame Patti (as the locals still call her) had a grand private railway carriage, and a special waiting room at the local station.  Celebrities and statesmen from all over the world came to visit her there.  She was an international superstar, and she had chosen to make her home in Wales because it reminded her alpine Switzerland.  Odd.  But true.

There are still some signs of the old grandeur, most impressively the miniature version of the opera house at La Scala, Milan, which is in fine condition, and is still used as a theatre and a venue for weddings.

In the grounds, there’s a fine statue of stag – so realistic that my dog froze at the sight of it.

Another real place that found its way into my writing was a remarkable museum in Florence – very close to some of the attractions the tourists queue for hours to see, but hardly visited by them.  It’s called La Specola, and it’s one of the oldest natural history museums in the world.  Thanks to budget problems, it hasn’t changed much over the years, and so it was easy for me to imagine what Montmorency would have made of it when he visited, more than a hundred years ago.

La Specola is full of wonderful exhibits – all the stuffed animals and pickled snakes you would expect.

But what marks it out as extraordinary is the unique collection of anatomical waxworks – brilliant works of art, made in the 18^th century to help medical students understand the structure and workings of the human body.

There are full-sized models that can be taken apart, detailed reconstructions of body parts, and even foetuses developing in the womb.  Because the floor has not been renewed for decades, you can tell by looking down which of the exhibits have won the most attention most attention over the years.

I went to see the waxworks twice, once as a tourist, and once to write an article about the place for The Times.  On that second visit, I was taken behind the scenes and allowed to hold some of the exhibits.  It was a thrill I will never forget.  Take a look at La Specola’s website and you will see what I mean.

If you know the Montmorency books, you will understand that I absolutely had to make the waxworks at La Specola part of one of the stories.  The story I wove round them was my own, but as with Craig-y-Nos in Johnny Swanson, the location and the images are real, and probably better than anything I could have invented myself.

Eleanor Updale has has written lots of stories for children, including the Montmorency series and the adventures of Johnny Swanson! You can read a review of that story here.

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. Should we go with something traditional, like an image of the two main characters? Or, seeing as this book might feasibly be described as having something in common with Life of Pi and Winnie-the-Pooh, should we be sensible and do something along these lines? Well, no. In the end we decided that we’d take a gamble. If you have a book that is quirky, hilarious and full of surprises, then why not put a quirky, hilarious and surprising cover on it:

(This is the map that the boy and the bear have with them. Needless to say, it doesn’t prove very useful.)

What do you think?

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton sets sail today, and to celebrate its publication we are having a launch party tonight at Heffers Booksellers, Cambridge (from 6.30pm). Please join us if you can – otherwise go and pick up the book, and find out what all the fuss is about!