November 2025
On the drawing front this month I've been concentrating on learning some techniques in perspective for my Adventures of Stilton story especially. I've been diligently following online tutorials and just trying some strategies to make interesting spaces and objects in those spaces and already these new techniques are improving my life. There are cool little tricks that just work because lines cross over each other and mark a point that would be laborious to measure. I'm sure I'll want describe more in the future when I have processed it more.
I held off learning about perspective until now because of the overhead of learning something new. Instead I was existing in a state of indeterminacy where your not happy with your work and you hope maybe something will just give. Except in this case it didn't until I took the initiative to skill up. I guess there is a fear that learning something new will change some nice innocent quality you had or sometimes you just don't like the feeling of doing something by a rule. I remember learning about writing to beats years ago and explaining this to an artist. I explained that there were these beat sheets of a basic story broken down into tiny parts and you could fashion your own story into this framework, thinking of it in detail but knowing it has a larger point and the artist just rejected the whole idea outright, as if there was something natural in stories that would be lost forever. I don't stick strictly to beats when I write usually, but I do think about structure and patterning and framing much more because I learned about that way of storytelling and that has become a huge part of the pleasure of writing for me.
Which brings me to what I wanted to share this month: the story of how one of my favourite stories I have written came about. It starts a few years ago when my nephew was about five years old and he didn't want to go to bed because, well, there are millions of reasons not to aren't there? I got the idea that I could make my nephew and my niece who was about four at the time, a book that was a little joke between us: a book that would send you to sleep. The Snooze Paper was born. "Having trouble sleeping? Try reading this!" was the strapline on the front cover. The first page of the first Snooze Paper was a true story that I really love about a seed that was discovered in Siberia that was preserved by the permafrost in an ancient squirrel burrow since the seeds formation in the ice age. The scientists who discovered the seed of the variety Silene stenophylla, then grew it and it flowered in such a beautiful way that I included a picture of the flower from the scientific paper along with the explanation of its origin which reads like a little poetic story. A pleasing start to the Snooze Paper that ran for the exact number of years it took before my niece and nephew had no problem going to bed.
Cut to more recently, when, I thought for a story that maybe a newspaper reporter could follow unusual discoveries that are chained together so one leads to the other, until all the rareness just feels ordinary. I also thought, in contrast, about the way kids are telling stories through their phones, videos and games, and with all this technology they just want to show you their shoe collection. It's children's desire to show you things that are massive in their world but trivial in anyone else's that is a great contrast to a reporter who is focused on what is extraordinary.
To inspire me to write interconnected news stories for my fictional reporter to report I researched 'and finally' stories that are told at the end of news programs. I found that there are many 'and finally' stories about letters that took decades to deliver from far away countries. I also noticed the story of a rare to the UK Golden Oriole bird that was rescued by a school cleaner. There was another story about a rare flower found on a electric substation, and there was the discovery of a decades-old lesson found on a hidden blackboard and a cat that stole their neighbour's sausages.
I liked that there could be a connection between the Golden Oriole and the decades old undelivered letter. I thought there could be a children's drawing of a Golden Oriole in the rare letter. So the clue to knowing where the letter could come from was connected with the Golden Oriole bird's migration path, assuming that the letter sender would draw a bird familiar to them to share with someone far away. The Golden Oriole birds summer in Europe and the Palearctic and spend their winter season in Central and Southern Africa. I loved the idea that the letter could come from an African country as some of the natural habitats these birds could winter include the Cape Floristic Kingdom and the Cuvette Centrale depression in the central Congo Basin. In such ecologically rich settings there might be a link to another news report for my fictional reporter.
Then a new 'and finally' story made the news. A church at Whitttlesford was unveiling a new stained glass window. The commissioned stained glass artist described on their website how they had worked with local people to come up with window design. I lived near to Whittlesford, so I walked to the church and as the sun shone through the stained glass I saw a picture of village life light up, surround by vibrant birds and flowers. It occurred to me I could have a church window in my story as the Golden Oriole bird would look brilliant in stained glass, and I could also have a rare flower on the window and make another link to another 'and finally' story. I could choose the rare flower at the electricity substation to be shown on the window or, it hit me, I could use the flower of the seed from Siberia that I had on the first page of the first Snooze Paper. Of course I want to use the Siberian seed story.
So I had a little puzzle on my hands: I had a story with a stained glass window which shows an ancient seed's newly grown flower along with a Golden Oriole bird and also I had in my story a laughably late delivered letter with a drawing of a Golden Oriole bird in it and I would be a fine trick to find a way to satisfyingly link between the ancient Siberian flower and the letter to give the story a circular structure. Then it occurred to me that commemorative stamps often show special regional flowers to celebrate ecological heritage. So the stamp on the late letter could have a flower on it, a flower in some way connected to the one on the church window. I searched archives of South African stamps with flowers and other Central to Southern African countries flower stamps, I considered the oldest plant life found in Africa and found some great stories but none that interconnected with the ones I had picked for my fictional reporter. Then I realised that the Siberian flower is from a set of species of the Caryophyllaceae family which is known less formally as the pink family or carnation. What if there was a flower from the pink family where the Golden Oriole might winter? The Caryophyllaceae family is known to have a cosmopolitan distribution meaning that it extends across most or all of the surface of the Earth in appropriate habitats. Then I discovered the Thunberg's wild pink, which is a member of the Caryophyllaceae family indigenous to the South Western Cape of South Africa where it occurs on rocky slopes from Swellendam in the Western Cape, Eastwards into the Eastern Cape Province, which is also a not unusual site for the wintering Golden Oriole. Bingo! I had finally connected enough parts of my story to meet my own satisfaction.
In the end I wrote a tale about two children who became unintentional detectives of their own story, caught up in something that starts with opening a letter that arrived at their house but wasn't addressed to them but a previous occupier from years ago, and letting the information and the technology they have at their hands work together. I was happy with how nicely interconnected the story was and how it was full of nature and themes of 'the way things move around the globe' and 'things preserved in time'. If you would like to read the final story just email me and eventually I'll find a nice way to share it more widely.
Also, while writing this note, I have noticed that the rare flower found in the electricity substation was also a member of the Caryophyllaceae family, so the story connections could have worked in a different way in another run of reality and the substation flower along with the old blackboard lesson and the sausage stealing cat could have made it into the story.