Art post: Hyacinth and Apollo

I work very, very slowly, and so it’s taken a rather long time to get this to a stage where I believe it is “finished” (or more accurately “I am never going to work on it again”).

This is Hyacinthus and Apollo, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which I read on the way too and from work during an alarmingly hot summer which also featured the Tube exploding), and part of an intended five-part series of mythological figures in art. So far I have Bacchus, Narcissus, Ganymedes, and now Hyacinthus and Apollo: the remaining picture is Icarus.

Prints available

Pretty much as soon as I started this I knew choosing a woodland glen as a setting rather than the nice clean countryside of the other pictures was going to be a mistake – even the grassy meadow Bacchus is frolicking through isn’t as much as a royal pain to render as the leaf-litter. To compensate for this, the Icarus painting takes place mostly against the sky, although I still have the feathers to paint which I’m sure won’t be at all annoying…

It is worth pointing out that my father is a painter of reasonable skill (if you like landscapes in oil); it’s also worth pointing out that if talent is hereditary it clearly skips a generation.

Filed under: content: artwork, apollo, art, artwork, creative, digital, greek myths, hyacinth, legend, metamorphoses, myth, ovid, painting, photoshop, queer

Withdrawn from Sale

Heads up! My pocket-sized mini-collections of short fiction, Tiny Fictions, are only going to be available in the overall collection form soon.

Still available

This means  I will be withdrawing from sale Tiny Fictions #1, #2, #3, and #4, at the end of May, both in physical and eReader formats.

Withdrawn from sale at the end of May 2012

Withdrawn at the end of May 2012

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, publishing, short fiction, withdrawal

Patron of the Arts Part 2

As I’ve previously mentioned, one of the great joys of having even a little spare money knocking around is the opportunity to commission artists to illustrate my work. Now, I’m not exactly flush at the moment, but I can spare enough to bring some beautiful black and white art to my living room, and to help an artist who needs money very fast.

I was so impressed with B.L. Becotte‘s work on the last commission (an illustration for a key scene in my most recent, first-draft-stage novel, As Simple As Hunger) that I immediately jumped for another; this artist’s style is perfect for the darker, gothic turns that some of my novels  have taken, and it’s art with a real grasp of the dramatic in terms of angles suited to storytelling.

Another of my books which was crying out for some illustrations and which I thought was perfectly suited to B. L. Becotte’s inky, Bisette-esque style is The Other Daughter, and so I eagerly flung a section of prose at the artist with a note reading “anything from this bit would be wonderful”.

I was right about it being wonderful.

Polly Mazlowsczy attacks Nancy Oakes, by B.L. Becotte

I just can’t get enough of those thick, solid, deep shadows, and the delirious and alarming sense of action this low angle gives to the scene. The indignity of the violence, Nancy’s position, the way Polly is standing with her chair-leg raised; everything here screams of a situation gone terribly awry and tells you you’re right in the middle of something. It’s masterful.

(You can buy The Other Daughter if you like – and you should, it’s a terribly compelling story – but I’m afraid this illustration isn’t in it!)

Filed under: content: artwork, content: publishing, content: review, art, artwork, b l becotte, black & white, black and white, books, commissions, illustration, midwest, patron of the arts, revenge, revenge tragedy, the other daughter, tragedy, violence, violent themes

Patron of the Arts

I love commissioning illustrations, and recently a friend of a friend, B. L. Becotte, was offering almost ludicrously cheap commissions for her Steve Bisette-like inky, dark, beautiful work. Naturally I fell over myself to ask for a commission or two, but had to take a moment to think about what, precisely, I should get. There are so many things I’d love to see drawn and don’t have the skill to draw, and it was almost impossible to narrow it down.

As Simple As Hunger, a fantasy novel of mine which is currently in the first draft stage and which features giant bugs, seemed the obvious candidate after our mutual friend assured me that the artist in question specialises in gore and body horror and would not be put off by my typically lurid requests (she had not stipulated any restrictions on commission subjects, but if someone’s doing something for me for money I don’t like to make them feel uncomfortable).

Here then is a key scene from As Simple As Hunger:

Commission by B.L. Becotte

If you’re very quick she might still be offering commissions!

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, art, as simple as hunger, b l becotte, black and white, commission, drawing, el alacran, illustration, ink, mantids, patronage, praying mantis, preying mantis, scorpion, steve bisette

Art Post: Warrior Poets

This probably constitutes fan art, although there’s a grand tradition of doodling these two chaps so I shan’t beat myself up too badly about it.

It is a friend‘s birthday soon (“soon” is an alarming amount of accuracy for me and birthdays, I can just about remember that people have them every year but never quite seem to keep up with them), and as we discussed on our jaunt around the Imperial War Museum, she’s very fond of the late, great Siegfried Sassoon. There are much better ways of showing one’s appreciation for someone than scribbling a portrait of their best-beloved World War One poet in Photoshop, but I’m brassic at present so it’s the best I can do for now!

Siegfried Sassoon

I’m not altogether pleased with how this came out: I think I overdid the line work and as is only to be expected, my cross-hatching is pitiful. I should have stuck with hatching.

Having learnt from my mistakes, I stripped back a lot of the line work in this sketch of T. E. Lawrence (during his days as Airserviceman Shaw), and left out most of the hatching. I also didn’t try cross-hatching this time! A much better end result:

Shaw/Lawrence

However, despite putting in a good few hours on it today, my attempts to finish my painting of Hyacinth and Apollo in a wooded glade some time before the heat death of the universe are not going very well at all.

Filed under: content: artwork, art, doodles, drawings, gifts, photoshop, poets, presents, siegfried sassoon, sketches, soldiers, t e lawrence, t. e. shaw, t.e.l., war heroes, world war one

Kindle Launch: Protect Me From What I Want

When a 40-year-old cold case opens unexpectedly on a sleepy island, John Hennessey (perpetually-on-the-brink-of-being-fired) finds his past comes back to haunt him, too. This unconventional tale is told in the first person to an unseen reporter, and through the eyes of a not-wholly honest observer.

Already available in print and EPUB format, now that I’ve got the hang of Kindle Direct Publishing a little better this unusual mystery story (that isn’t really a mystery) is also available for Kindle for £2.64; I promise it doesn’t contain as many Bergerac references as the Lulu.com tags may make it look like.

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, bergerac, books, cold case, creative, creative writing, dark romance, detective, ebooks, fiction, first-person narrative, jersey, kindle, literary fiction, mystery, noir, thriller, writing

Kindle Launch: Year of the Ghost

Already available for those with other eReaders, Year of the Ghost: Collected Poems 2011 is now available on the Kindle for the princely sum of £1.01 (the extra penny is for luck, you know), just in case you need an emergency collection of recent poetry to see you through your long commute, or are struck with the sudden need for a poem about the plagues of London while stuck in a traffic jam.

Year of the Ghost: Collected Poems 2011 is only available in electronic format for the foreseeable future. Naturally, if a print edition comes out you’ll be the first to hear about it!

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: poetry, content: publishing, amazon, book launch, books, collection, creative, creative writing, ebook, kindle, new poetry, poems, poetry, publishing, writing, year of the ghost

Art Post: Pil Lae-Soo

Continuing the business of annoying people with character shots for a story I haven’t actually properly explained yet (The Advent Chronicles), here is Pil Lae-Soo.

Pil Lae-Soo occupies a nebulous moral position in the story, and as “I’m” researching his background at the moment (or rather, my unpaid research assistant and Philly-based archival fox G. is narrowing down the stuff I need to read so that I don’t sit in front of a stack of books crying; I am very bad at research), I had a go at making him a profile picture so as to get a better idea of what he looks like.

Originally Pil Lae-Soo looked like Ken Watanabe in my head, but that was more a place-holder because Ken Watanabe is Japanese and Pil Lae-Soo (as you can probably tell from his name) is supposed to be Korean and to be honest even using Ken Watanabe as a place-holder there was supremely offensive. Sorry. What I wanted was someone with a Ken Watanabe-esque feel, which sounds desperately poncy and for which I can only apologise.

I had a bit of a Google around for Korean men of Pil Lae-Soo’s time period, but there aren’t many photographs and none of the resolution I needed; in the end I found a photo of a young couple taken in 1968 which looked about right, and made a little effort to age up the male face presented in it (as Pil Lae-Soo is meant to be in his 40s).

One thing doing all these headshots in “fake, old photo” style has allowed me to do is mess around with different ways of producing the effect. This portrait was painted entirely in three shades of khaki, using hatching, and then backgrounds, filters, posterizing and grains put in to create the newsprint effect. It is different to the limited-palette colouring I used on Maddy Richards and Matthew Needham, and to the single-colour hatching I used for Fleur du Mal, and I think it suits the newsprint style.

As I’ve done four of these now (there are a lot more characters to go though!), here’s a quick retrospective.

maddy richards, matthew needham, pil lae-soo, and fleur du mal

Filed under: content: artwork, 1920s, 1927, advent chronicles, art, being a clueless white lady, character profiles, characters, drawing, fiction, korean diaspora, noir, painting, pil lae-soo, pulp, serial

Kindle Launch: The Other Daughter

Polly Mazlowczy has returned from a fictitious conflict in North Korea a changed woman. Just how changed, her strange and insular family and the people of an isolated Midwestern town are about to discover. The Other Daughter is a revenge tragedy of the old school given a modern twist.

This book is already available in print (and you can learn more about the book at that link too) but now that I’ve got the hang of Kindle Direct Publishing it’s also available as a Kindle book too. Because there are no printing costs to cover I can offer it a lot more cheaply for the Kindle (as should all publishers, which is another grumpy rant for another day but honestly, if the physical book is £7.99 the eBook shouldn’t be £7.99 as well! Come on, guys!), and The Other Daughter for Kindle is available for the cheap-as-chips £2.64.

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, ebook, fiction, horror, kindle, mid-west, publishing, revenge, shakespeare, stories, tragedy, trauma, voodoo, writing, zombies

Book launch: Collected Poems 2011 (eBook only)

This does exactly what it says on the tin: collects up every single poem I wrote in 2011 and puts it online as an EPUB available from Lulu.com (and also I believe the iBook store and Barnes & Noble or something). Some of them are exceptionally silly (I mean, some of them are about the X-men, I wasn’t po-facedly composing pastoral literature here), some of them are very personal, some of them are good, some of them are … less wonderful.

Stand-out poems that I recall include the title poem year of the ghost, reflecting on quite how many people had died already when I wrote it in early 2011; it is a sestina, and it was unfortunately more prophetic than I realised. Another was thule, related to the horrific shootings in Utoya, and Pyrexia as revolutionary fever seemed to grip large segments of the world. I’m not usually given to writing political poetry as I’m always worried about coming off sounding like Rik from the Young Ones (BBC), but it’s hard not to want to process real-life events through art; the year closed with Stop, You’re Killing Me, which linked together all of the protests of the year under one banner.

I’ve also written more about science in the last year than is usual, and after watching Wonders with the delightful Brian Cox embarked on an ambitious attempt to mimic structurally the lifecycle of a universe in poetic form, imaginatively titled Life Cycle; I spent a while learning about sound technology and the related physics, which came through in poems like FM and wave.table; I learnt about Victorian London in more depth and produced This Pestilent City.

London, along with fairytale and mythological imagery, and viscera, is a constant source of inspiration and a good number of poems have been devoted to it this year as in previous years.

The cover is a departure from the usual Gothic masterpieces or piles of papers that make up my poetry book covers, but I think there’s something quite bold about the minimalism of it. What do you think?

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Collected Poems 2011 by Delilah Des Anges is available for £2.99.

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: poetry, content: publishing, arab spring, books, brian cox, death, design, ebook, ebooks, epub, minimalism, poems, poetry, prosody, protest, publishing, science, sestina, utoya, writing, x-men