Engine Punk

Ten odd things about the terrible giant lamb of Wormton (make that 11 things *stance*) 1.           The Wormton Lamb begins life as a normal lamb in Mr Gaffathwaite’s flock of Cornucopian Tablebacks. 2.                 Billy Brockhouse sells his soul so he can daemonstrate (yes, daemonstrates) his aggro-chemicals to a sceptical farming community. 3.                 The creature that results proves more than a match for even the cleverest three-headed sheepdog(s). 4.                 The Wormton Lamb is never quite what it seems. 5.                 The Mithering Brethren would love to take credit for the creation of the creature but – for once – are ...

The cover depicted here may not be what you get. Do let me know what comes in the post if you order one. The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb are still available on Amazon but I am re-launching both books with new covers. This is because I have finished writing the rest of the Soul Trader trilogy and will be gradually releasing two new books that continue the misadventures of Hob the Horsepower Whisperer and his chumrades. If anyone orders hard copies of either The Horsepower Whisperer or The Wormton Lamb, they will receive a book with the old cover until any stock is used up. Any print-on-demand orders for The Wormton Lamb with Amazon should already feature the latest cover design. This has not happened in the past. I know that a relative bought a copy of The Horsepower Whisperer from Amazon last year and it had the very first ever cover, dating back to 2008. I am now up to cover number three. I can only assume Amazon ordered a stock of my books on publication and they may st...

1.                 The story begins with a growth hormone experiment that goes horribly wrong. 2.                 The tale of The Wormton Lamb asks us what are we doing to rural communities and our environment through the unseen effects of self-interest by people who have sold their souls. 3.                 The book introduces the traffiscope, a means of predicting the future by studying the traffic. What road sign are you? 4.                 It is set in the wider Wold around the flock market town of Wormton. 5.                 It also introduces the Mithering Brethren who believe souls can be improved if they are th...

I’ve finished the Soul Trader trilogy and will be re-relaunching The Horsepower Whisperer very dreckly. Possibly soon than that. This means new covers, ebooks and audiobooks. The Wormton Lamb will probably re-launch first. This is not part of the Soul Trader trilogy but a spin-off featuring some of the same characters. The reason this refresh might happen sooner is I want to check for consistency across all three parts of the Soul Trader story.

A chair grown by Full Grown (Photo : Full Grown) Soon after I wrote The Wormton Lamb , some freakishly large baby sheep were born locally . Now I hear that someone is putting into practice what George Ransomes was doing. In The Wormton Lamb , George was a bodger,  a hedgerow carpenter. He came from a long line of bodgers, people who made perfectly good chairs and tables out of scraps rejected for more professional furniture. However, he had an idea. wouldn't it safe a lot of effort if you just grow the trees into the shapes you wanted? Why can't you grow your own furniture? The Wormton Lamb is a fantasy but I am delighted to hear that the Full Grown furniture company are actually doing this! They didn't get the idea from me. They were concerned about the waste created by the traditional timber trade and the result is a piece of organic furniture that has no joins ! It has better structural integrity and has less material waste. Its labour intensive and time...

I am currently re-drafting the beginning of my next book and it has occurred to me how much of this self-publishing lark has nothing to do with the simple act of getting your thoughts down on paper. Or a screen. Or a digital dictaphone. Assembling these often random ideas into a coherent story also takes a lot of time but I quite enjoy doing that - drafting and re-drafting until the story has a direction that and sense of purpose that makes it almost write itself. Once I have that all important orientation in the narrative, the story assumes a kind of critical mass and I get carried away by it until it's finished. It always needs more polishing once I've reached The End but by then I can see the whole story, something no amount of planning can bring out. So that's the writing part, the easy bit. The self-publishing manuals are also telling me to do a whole lot of other things. Some of them I find easy, others I don't. And if I am to be a writer who actua...

Here I am doing it!

My trusty old laptop is no longer so trusty. After switching on and the appearance of all the menus, neither the wireless mouse and touch pad work. It doesn't respond to any of the keys on the keyboard, eitehr. I think it's something to do with the McAfee Security system. There is a limited period of time when the mouse does work erratically and I can click on some of the icons but as soon as the McAfee symbol appears everything grinds to a halt. This Acer laptop is coming up to 3 years old but, as you can see, I have used it so much in that time that I've worn away the silver finish on the leading edge. I added numerous pieces of software to read to allow me to build my own website and create my own videos. I also added a PCMCIA card and a wireless mouse and keyboard. But about this time last year it was apparent that I had found the limits of what this machine could do so I replaced it with my desktop. It was still useful to have the laptop around that, in addition to...

 I know that I keep going on about it but I'm still very excited about the look of The Wormton Lamb. A large batch from the printer has arrived here at Anarchadia Publishing and soon I can start sending them out. Although two boxes full may not sound much, when I look at them I can't help but think about what it must be like to have a whole garage full. That would have been the result if I'd had a conventional print run. This is the first batch of pre-publication copies of The Wormton Lamb and I'm going to have to think very carefully about to whom I send them. Several obvious recipients are the national libraries for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Every book that has an ISBN must by law have a copy lodged with each of these national libraries. It seems like an expensive business at the time that is a consequence of having an ISBN. Personally, I think the benefits of having an ISBN outweigh the costs of sending out library copies but I know some ...

I had a pleasant surprise on Friday when I return from work. The proof for The Wormton Lamb had arrived. Here is, resplendent in its new cover design. I've been checking it through over the weekend and on Sunday night was delighted to be able to send Lightning Source a message accepting this proof. I had a couple of e-mails from Lightning Source today confirming the dispatch of two separate orders of copies of The Wormton Lamb. A carton of 20 will soon be arriving at my door as well as a solitary copy but I must ordered for some reason months ago. It serves to remind me how long this process has taken and what a milestone I have reached. All I have to do is publicise it so -- tell your friends!

My earlier blog about submitting files to Lightning Source prompted a comment from none other than Aaron Shepard, doyen of self publishing authors and the man behind Aiming at Amazon . Aaron has tried just about every alternative when it comes to producing books over the Internet and is a regular contributor to the self-publishing and print on demand discussion groups on Yahoo. If it hadn't been for his book I would still be metaphorically banging the rocks together and going "Ook!" instead of already having the first part of the Soul Trader Trilogy available on Amazon. I was so impressed with Aiming at Amazon that I gave it 5 stars when I reviewed it on Amazon. You don't believe me, click on link. Aaron must be cruising the Internet, righting wrongs and fighting corrupted files wherever he can find them for he found my blog entry soon after it was published and left a comment. His advice was to stop messing about with Open Office Writer and to use Adobe Acrobat...

 Last night, I checked into the customer area on the Lightning Source website to check the status of my uploaded files for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb. The proof was ready for The Wormton Lamb but today I had a message from my customer rep to tell me that the text file for The Horsepower Whisperer was corrupted on pages 5 and 6. These pages are the ones that feature the maps at the beginning of my books. They consist of layered drawings and if any part of the pdf was likely to become corrupt this was it. However, all my files at home look okay so I can only assume that the CD that went to Lightning Source in the states was damaged in some way. I would've uploaded a new file for The Horsepower Whisperer and ordered a proof for The Wormton Lamb tonight but the Lightning Source website is being maintained at the moment. I regenerated a text file pdf for The Horsepower Whisperer just to make sure there were no problems but notice something odd in the proces...

As you can probably imagine, I am very excited by the prospect of seeing my new covers in real life. Lightning Source got back to me today to confirm my instructions. They just wanted to check that I really wanted to revise the files for The Horsepower Whisperer. Those for The Wormton Lamb we obviously a resubmission but as The Horsepower Whisperer was already in production they wanted to make sure that I wanted to revise it before they leapt into action. I'm glad they did this. I find there's never any harm in checking and I can only assume that they have found this out as well. Now that they have my confirmation, I can already see from my customer account area on their website that The Wormton Lamb as its new cover and a proof copy is already available for ordering. The Horsepower Whisperer, which has new files that both the text block and the front cover, is still in pre-media. The immediate timetable works out something like this. I should be able to order ...

Both The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb are now in revision at Lightning Source. I can enter my account area to monitor progress and once the revisions have been accepted I will order proofs. It's a case of checking every day now. Once that stage is complete, I should get proofs in a couple of working days. In the meantime, I've been working on the next part of the Soul Trader trilogy. The title for this is The Grey Ones. This is also the title of a short story by J B Priestley, which I really enjoyed. The story is completely different but if anyone challenges me about it I'll say I'm paying "an homage" to it. I probably mentioned this before, but I raved about this story on a car club forum a few years ago. Everyone was griping about the growing police state and the sense of big brother watching you and slowly grinding our spirits down. I recommended J B Priestley's story to those in need and many years later at a meeting in Edinbu...

I've had a few problems with uploading the new cover for The Wormton Lamb. First of all I couldn't log into the Lightning Source website. It seems MacAfee didn't recognise it as a secure site and I had to create an exception report to gain entry into the customer area with my log in name and password. As I'd used the Lightning Source site before when uploading files for both The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb so had no qualms about this. When it came to uploading the pdf file for the new cover, the process was interrupted three times. Each repeat attempt completed less of the process, I started at 17% and ended up at 2%. A pop up box gave the following message. "An error has occurred processing your upload: An IO error occurred. Please try again or contact technical support for assistance." So, I'll have to do that tomorrow. This is the first time I've tried uploading a new file with my new computer. The last time I uploade...

The Wormton Lamb now looks like this. I came to the conclusion that the original illustration was dominated by the cars in the foreground. Now the lamb is much more prominent and the cars look more dynamic. As well as the 2CV kicking up its heels you can just make out Hob on Nosferatu riding dangerously close to its cloven heels. I have abandoned the use of marker pens - although I'll continue to use them for website drawings - and after flirting briefly with oils and acrylic inks have adopted gouache as my medium. I'd like to experiment with oils more but oils take so long to dry. It's a whole technique, too, but the paint feels fantastic on the brush and I really like the smell (although not enough to dream of eating a tube of cadmium yellow, as owner of my mates did once.) Beck said she liked the graph qualities of the clouds in my original drawing and after a great deal of trial and error I am reasonably content with them. I think they make the Giant Lamb loo...

It's been a long journey bit the new designs for my book covers are nearly ready. I can't show them to you yet. This isn't any attempt at showmanship - it's just that I don't have them in format that Blogger will take as an upload. The Horsepower Whisperer was pretty good out of the box. Beck and I were pretty happy with that one but Beck suggested breaking up the cloudless sky with some, well, clouds. She said she liked the original sky that I'd created because it was more graphic. So I had a go at some clouds and found that clouds are hard. I can't remember drawing or painting clouds realistically before. I feel I've come on some way since the time when I drew the first illustration of The Wormton Lamb. To cut along story short i messed up the original painting with sub-standuard clouds. Fortunately, I subsequent attempt produced clouds that looked more cloudy and Beck, who has the technology, was able to splice my new clouds behind the dancing ...

I had a good graphic design session with Rebecca Morton at Red Snapper last night. You'll have heard of Beck before on this blog. Dammit - you'll have eaten yoghurt from the pots she designed for Rachel's Organic Yoghurt and seen her work on the Milk Marque lorries. Here she is in action, pointing out something important I hadn't spotted. Of course, as soon as she'd shown me what was wrong it was obvious. She also showed me the amazing things the full verison of Photoshop can do. Well, some of them anyway. "Look how easily I can get rid of the blemishes," she said. "What blemishes?" I replied. I'd been really careful not to get oily fingerprints on my work but there they were. And then there they were - gone. In the hands of an expert like Beck the results were frankly mind blowing - and so quick to make! We've experimented with a couple of ideas but the favourite so far seems to be a refined version of that mugged togethe...

Here's the new cover illustrations for The Horsepower Whisperer . As with any picture on this blog or the one known as Engine Punk if you click on the image you'll see a large image. I was happy enough with the earlier cover design for some time but as soon as I'd revamped my website it looked a little staid. I realized I could do better and ever since then my publishing adventure has been on hold while I embarked on a remembering-how-to-paint trip. I donned blinkers and stopped doing many of the other things I enjoy like writing and welding in my determination to add as much pizzazz as I could to my covers. It became an obsession and I entered that dark tunnel where you strive for perfection knowing that it is really an impossible dream. I never really know what keeps me going during these times for there are no travelling companions but at last I have emerged, blinking in the sunlight, reconciled to the lack of perfection but reasonably happy with the result. It’s be...

The new cover designs for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb are coming on. Although I would have preferred to have finished them both by now, I'm enjoying myself. I haven't indulged in painting with oils or gouache since I was at Falmouth School of Art. I'd forgotten how much I like the smell of turpentine and the feeling of the paint on the brush. I've forgotten a lot about technique but the most striking thing of all to come back to me is that profound sense of peace when I'm focussed on painting. It's taken a little while to return. I was hurrying too much to start with, treating the materials as if I was familiar with them and in control. I've been using sprit markers for year but they seem a bit unsubtle for illustrations, although fine for renderings of cars or motorbikes. Another thing that's come back to me is how awful green tastes. If I'm doing a wash, inevitably I lick my paintbrush if it's too wet or carries t...