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Producing a Cover for 'Roadrage'

24/4/2013

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PictureRoadrage cover design by Tom Johnson
I never take it for granted how fortunate I am to have a son who's an accomplished artist, and who has so far willingly supported the writing I've produced with his excellent artwork (visit his site). I recently took a copy of the Roadrage cover in to show the manager of a nearby independent bookshop who has been helpful and supportive ever since I first thrust a copy of Niedermayer & Hart at him. When I showed him the cover for Roadrage, already aware the book was set locally, he smiled and exclaimed, "Ooh yes, I think you'll sell a lot of these!"

"Hope so," I said.

Once again the cover was planned, designed and executed by my son Tom. Unlike his original watercolour  of Valle Crucis Abbey that graces the cover of N & H, he decided that Roadrage required something altogether different. He posted himself on the bridge that runs across our nearest dual-carriageway one night and started taking photographs. He experimented with slowing down the camera shutter speed until he achieved the desired effect - until the cars themselves had disappeared from the image and only their headlights remained visible. He then set to work with Photoshop applying different filters and cloning pieces of the image he wasn't happy with until he got it right. When this was complete he added the text and we had a test print done by a quality local printer. This highlighted a few infinitesimally small details that irritated Tom, and therefore needed adjusting. There were a few last minute (tiny) tweaks made to the text, and there you have it! An idea, collaboration wherever necessary, and about seventy or eighty hours of graft.

Such an incredible amount of work and attention to detail goes into creating a book cover. From a personal perspective writing the 'blurb' is about the trickiest writing task imaginable. How do you give a potential reader enough information to whet their appetite without giving away anything fundamentally important to the plot? It's not something I particularly relish doing. However, having said that, getting to grips with a piece of text and reworking it until it expresses exactly what I want it to, is always rewarding. The two hundred and seventeen words on the back cover of Roadrage (that's including the one hundred and twenty word excerpt from the book itself and already written, see below) took fourteen drafts to get right. Our little team, yes, it's totally a team effort, keep working at it until we're all thoroughly satisfied. Then we find at least three friendly souls who are willing to proof-read it carefully. Experience has taught that familiarity with a piece of text can make even the most observant amongst us totally blind to tyspo (that one's deliberate!).  

... Gil had managed about thirty yards before he realised to his horror that the other car was tagging alongside ... the speedometer needle passed eighty, eighty-five, ninety. At each of these stages Gil looked over his shoulder to see if his pursuer had given up. There was no change. Ninety-five, a hundred, a hundred and five; his persecutor was right beside him. Gil was beginning to feel a loss of control in the steering as the wheels found it increasingly difficult to gain purchase on the wet surface. At a hundred and ten Gil had nosed ahead by a few yards, a cold sweat breaking out on his upper lip, the car slithering like a toboggan on a slalom run ...

Roadrage by M J Johnson

ISBN: 978-0-9562873-4-2


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A Nice Cup of Tea

17/4/2013

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PictureGreat Aunt (Bopa) Mary 1887-1972 (c.1964)
My Great Aunt Mary, who often bore a taciturn expression, even at those times when there was a twinkle in her eye, liked nothing better than a cup of tea. She was often heard to declare that the only thing that got her through the war years was a nice cup of tea! She meant WW2 and the rationing that was imposed on everyone - just 2 ozs of tea (about 50g) each week, used sparingly was possibly
just enough for three or four cups a day (about a third of my daily intake). I think Adolf Hitler made a bad misjudgement when he attacked the ships bringing
us our tea supplies - in fact, he couldn't have picked a better way of getting our British backs up and inducing the bitterest anger in our bulldog breed. Without any prejudice intended towards tea drinkers from other lands, I hold an
unshakeable belief that you have to be from these Isles to fully appreciate the significance of Great Aunt Mary's remark about 'a nice cup of tea'. I mean to
say, ever heard anyone describe a cup of coffee as nice? Come off it! I seriously don't think so. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy drinking this too. You often hear superlatives used to describe a particularly good cup of coffee, like 'best' 'excellent' 'wonderful' - it can even be described as 'mean' (suggesting it has really hit the required spot). However, the adjective 'nice', and I don't care how prejudicial this may sound, is only ever applicable to just one
beverage, and that's tea!
 
Perhaps the unpredictable British weather is to a large degree responsible for our devotion to the drink. On those dismal days when the sky is grey, and the damp seems to have crept into your bones and you feel like hurling yourself at the ground and sobbing, a cup of tea is sometimes the last defence, the only thing capable of reviving the spirits enough to carry on. I am certainly not alone in my appreciation of tea. The great writer George Orwell wrote an essay on the subject; strangely enough, his was entitled A Nice Cup of Tea too. He set down eleven points that in his opinion had to be strictly adhered to in order to produce the perfect cup. Some people might describe this attention to detail as fanatical, and I might well agree - but this happens to be tea we're talking about!
 
I am not alone either:
 
"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea."
- Sydney Smith, A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
 
"We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week ...
The bottom is out of the Universe."
-  Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling
 
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
- C S Lewis
 
Tea hee hee!


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The Chauvet Cave

10/4/2013

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Last weekend we watched a fantastic film about the Ice Age artwork discovered in the Chauvet Cave situated in the Ardèche region of Southern France. On December 18, 1994, three friends discovered a tiny opening, barely large enough to admit them. They soon realised that what they had come across was of very great significance. The entrance they found has now been widened and a steel door has been put in place to protect the site. The public are not allowed to visit the cave because of the age and fragility of the discoveries there. The French Government have since taken on responsibility for the conservation and protection of the cave, and here's a link to the official website:  The Chauvet Cave 

In 2010 German director Werner Herzog and a small crew were allowed to film inside the cave. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is most certainly eighty-seven minutes of worthwhile viewing. The wall paintings are extremely beautiful and demonstrate a flair and artistry that truly take the breath away. For reasons unknown to us now, the makers of the wall paintings of some 32,000 years ago, and at intervals since, deliberately came here and set about leaving their marks. They appear to have scraped back the walls to help enhance the effect of their work. The sheer skill and sophistication of the creators of the art is extraordinary and it's hardly surprising that at first questions were asked about their authenticity - no longer in any doubt. Literally hundreds of animal bones were discovered scattered throughout the caves, however there appears to be no evidence of human habitation. In one place, there is the footprint of a child, estimated to be about eight years of age imprinted in the clay along with the paw print of a wolf - possibly from the same era or possibly separated by millennia. The original entrance to the cave was lost after a rock fall some 27,000 years ago.

There are plans afoot to recreate the cave and the art they contain at a location a few miles away from their natural situation, which, although only a facsimile, would at least allow the public to visit and experience it for themselves.


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Easter Weekend

3/4/2013

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Picture
I spent most of Easter weekend doing a final proof-reading of Roadrage. To avoid 'drifting away' because I know every phrase and textual quirk to the point of madness, I read the book out of sequence. I highly recommend this method if you're over-familiar with the text and you're not reading for sense alone but just looking for typos and things that go clunk. This was the fifth time the book has been proof-read, and the second time by me. I wish I could say I hadn't found anything to cause my eyebrows any agitation whatsoever - but hey, this is a hundred thousand word novel, not a flippin' haiku! I reckon novel writing could never be the preferred form for a total perfectionist because they'd never get to the point where they felt the work was ready for publication. However, to be fair to my dedicated team of generous helpers, the text of Roadrage (except for those little demons that managed to escape all of us - and there will be a few, I don't doubt!), it was pretty much a glitch-free-zone.

Easter Sunday was the highlight of the weekend. We rose fairly early and drove the thirty odd miles to Hastings. The main purpose was to visit Judy's eighty nine year old Mum who we like to see as regularly as possible and who we spent the early afternoon with. However first of all we attended Meeting for Worship at the Friends' Meeting House in Hastings. We aren't ourselves Quakers but we used to attend that meeting regularly when we lived in East Sussex. They are a friendly bunch of people and we have always felt at home with the Society's liberal views and greatly admire the high ethical values of its members. An hour spent mostly in silence is also very welcome. It's only when I consciously focus my thoughts on 'higher matters' that I realise how much extraneous 'babble' is generally going on inside my head.

After the meeting we parked the car on the West Hill and walked down to Hastings' Old Town and bought ourselves a bag of fish and chips at the Blue Dolphin Fish and Chip Shop. Lovely. We ate them huddled together in a shelter on the sea-front, out of the very worst of the fiercely cold wind along with some other plucky Britons, who, like our shivering selves, were determined not to be beaten by the weather. We couldn't help the odd reminiscence about Easter weekends past when the sun smiled down on us. At one point it was actually snowing!


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