Buttercup update

Things are moving with Buttercup. Don't want to tempt fate, so I'll steer clear of details. But I did get to work on a few illustrations to see if I could settle on a style for the internals. An editor may well want to use their own illustrator or have a particular style in mind, and that's fine. This was purely for my own entertainment.

I had to go round the houses to find a style that suited the story. It took about a week. At one point, she was very refined with crisp, clean line work, bunches in her hair and a neck like ET - something between Disney and Manga. Far too refined, and very difficult to redraw in different scenes and situations. What I really want is something I can draw fast, the way I draw when I'm teaching or reading a story in class, but as far as my own finished artwork goes, I've always had this habit of developing things too far (if you have a look at the line work in the ARTWORK section of this site, you'll see what I mean - especially the Easter drawings and Dr. Lobotomy).

I got fed up, decided I couldn't draw a thing and was ready to give up. In sheer frustration, I drew something as fast as I could - exactly the way I'd draw on a whiteboard at school, and sat back. It looked okay - very scribbly, but okay. So I kept going and things got better and better. Here's a couple of examples...

The same day I settled on these drawings, I was contacted by an agent. I was utterly bowled over by her enthusiasm, not just for Buttercup but me as a writer and where I'm going next. In short, I've never felt so excited! Announcement soon...

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Writing on a Chromebook

I've been playing with a budget Chromebook for the past few months and have to say, a Chromebook is a pretty good choice for writing. I'm using an Acer CB314-1H which cost me a whopping £79 (thanks to a £100 cashback deal). It has a bright, crystal clear FHD screen, a fantastic keyboard (much better than my HP laptop) and it is super lightweight. As far as the keyboard goes, on first impressions, it seems that the keyboard has no delete key or CAPS lock, but both are available with help from the ALT key. It also seems that there is no way to turn the Trackpad off. This takes about ten seconds on Google to enable debug shortcuts, but to be honest, even with the option available, I rarely use. I catch my laptop trackpad all of the time, but hardly ever on the Chromebook. The next thing to consider is software. There's Google docs. You can waste time searching the internet for alternatives, but this means enabling Linux and playing about and it's really not worth it. I man...

Rock Music, Stage Diving and a Fire Crew - It's the Clash Launch Party

Thursday 3rd March was one of the craziest nights of my life. Rather than launch the book in a shop or library, I booked a theatre and got local teen rock band, Hell's Marauders , to play. There were a few surprises during the night. The first was the cake Paula had made, with the full clash cover printed on the icing. The second was the fire engine in the car park.The third was being dragged up on stage to sing Anarchy in the UK with the band. I think I might be the first author to do a stage dive at a launch party. The fire crew were there thanks to Nev. Nev gave me some help on a few technical details in the novel. He was on call on Thursday night but wanted to come along, so he turned up in a fire engine with the whole crew. Catnip editor Non Pratt got up to do a truly wonderful introduction, then I jumped up, grabbed the mike and screamed out, "HELLO FATFIELD!" - proper rockstar style! I calmed down enough to do a short talk about YA fiction and a read...

Writing Challenge Day 3 - Back to Scrivener

Sorry Scrivener, all is forgiven. I've actually been using LibreOffice for about a month because I was using for a different project over the holiday period, and generally, everything was fine. But then today, right in the middle of a sprint, it started acting a little weird. I tried to undo a few things only to see it replace chunks of text with error messages. Then it crashed completely. Thing is, this document is less than 5,000 words. That's not a lot for a word processor to handle. And while it autorecovered the file, it's still one too many crashes for me. Going to back to Scrivener, I suddenly remembered the Session Target tool. This makes life so much easier, as I can see, as I type, my progress. In LibreOffice I'd have to paste the word count into the spreadsheet I'd made. Project targets window It also displays as a line bar at the top of the project with the Manuscript Target at the top, above the chapter title, and the Session Target below, so there...

Colin Mulhern

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