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I’ve always had a bit of a love for Michael Marshall Smith’s work. His SF books are fantastic, and I hugely enjoyed The Straw Men, under his Crime Fiction persona of Michael Marshall. I adore his character work, though he seems to shine best when he has licence for things to get a little strange. So, I was really excited when I realised he’d donned another hat as ‘M. M. Smith’ and written a YA novel. Well, ‘Novella’ technically, but that really is just a technicality with this one.

The Strangers is a little misleading on the outside. Its short length and 11-year old protagonist could easily trick you into thinking it’s going to be superficial or simplistic, when it turns out it’s anything but. The one thing I’ve always said about MMS’s work is he writes about being drained, tired and emotionally shattered better than anyone else I can think of, and that skill is out in full force here. For all the touches of the fantastic, it’s a deeply personal and emotional book, made all the more poignant by the youth of its narrator.

The Servants tells the story of a boy named Mark, who has been forced to move from London to Brighton with his sickly mother and his new stepfather, David. Angry and frustrated, Mark finds a new perspective when he meets the old lady that lives in the flat under their house, who introduces him to the hidden world the servants had once occupied. A world that may be less confined to the past than it seems. The ghost story of the servants is intertwined with the complex relationship between Mark, David, his mother, and their own pasts, and beautifully captures the helplessness, confusion and frustration of a child who’s whole life has been upturned by things he doesn’t quite understand.

MMS captures Mark’s rage perfectly, putting the reader in an interesting position of sympathising with him while knowing things are not quite the way they might seem. As the book progresses, hints of the greater complications in his situation are carefully woven in in ways that we can pick up on even if Mark doesn’t. Childish stubbornness mixes with denial and his genuine incomprehension, and before the end I found myself feeling for Mark’s loathed stepfather as much as I did for Mark. There are points where it becomes simply heartbreaking. Like the later books of A Series of Unfortunate Events, it’s one of those rare children’s books with an overarching message of “There’s always more to what is happening than you understand.”

Alongside the real-world story, of tiny battles over diet coke and take away food, and musings over falling off skateboards, MMS also introduces us to the mysterious world of the servants. If I had one criticism on this book, it’s that I wish there’d been more time spent there. When I first finished the story I was a little dissatisfied with the glimpses of the ghostly world but on reflection, it’s used in an incredibly clever way, leading to an intensely personal and emotional little novel. What we do get is vivid and intriguing, snapshots of the inner working of a historical house and glimpses of the drama inside and above that grows into something more fantastic again.

Metaphors and clever narrative techniques aside, the prose is rich, vivid and engaging. While it’s told in 3rd person, it’s heavily influenced by Mark’s thoughts as it paints the faded glory of Brighton and the claustrophobic strangeness of the world under the stairs—evocatively tapping into the way a person’s inner thoughts can soak through all their experiences. MMS is on top form emotionally, and also keeps a spark of wit and humour going throughout that stops it ever getting too cloying. The whole thing adds up to a sad, strange but beautiful little novel that I’d recommend to anyone, not just YA readers.

You can read a sample chapter of The Servants on its Amazon page, here.

I just got featured over at the NICALiS Cave Story blog. Go check it out, and the rest of the featured artists. There’s some killer work there and I’m honoured to be a part of it.

Interview Go!

Things have been a little mental lately, but back to say hi again and give you some rambling updates.

MG&GL has been going pretty well so far, although the slow speed I’m able to work on it is being a little excruciating. Jack and I actually have quite a lot of story planned out for the thing that I can’t wait to get to. And in the mean time it’s been fun to draw, and an interesting challenge adapting his prose into single-page suitable scripts (when I’m much more used to working long-form.) (more…)

As part 1 in my ‘GET STUFF DONE THIS YEAR’ plot, I’ve been working furiously with the lovely Calico Jacque to bring you our first go at a weekly web comic!

Minnie Gunn and the Gentlelady Thief

(You might recognise the seeds of this thing here…)

We’ve been having a lot of fun working on it, I hope you have as much fun reading it.

In other news, I have a whole bunch of Workshops in the pipeline, focused in North Yorkshire. Watch this space for more details.

Have a good one, shiny happy people!

Okay then, 2010.

I’ve skimped out on doing a ‘review of 2009′ kind of a post, due to running around like a mad thing for most of the holiday period. But there have been some awesome things over this last year.

Such as:

• Doing loads of workshops, both in art and joining the ranks of Shooting Roots. More is going on the workshop front, so watch this space.
• Getting nominated for the Society of Authors’ Educational Writers prize and tripping down to the House of Commons for the reception. I didn’t win the prize but it was an  absolute honour being shortlisted, I was up against some stunning work. Plus I got to chat to Nick Sherratt and that’s just cool.
• A lot of making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. There are some very inspiring people in my life right now.
• Got to see Shooglenifty and the Edward II reunion (twice in the latter case) which would tie for gig of the year, but I also got to Michael Marra again.
• Took some script writing classes and they’ve really sparked me up. Learned a tonne more about web design and photoshoppery. While I haven’t managed as much art or writing as I would have liked, I think I’ve been improving in what I have done.

Not bad for what has effectively been a down-time year.

Of course, there’s been some rough stuff along with the good, but most of it was beyond my control, a long time coming, or just serving as part of the spark to power some much needed arse-kicking. It’s been a weird one, but as it is the future and all, I decree 2010 to be a year of getting it together.

Last time I did a ‘this year, I resolve to…’ post, it jinxed it all so I’m not going to. But I have some fun plans and projects I can’t wait to share with you guys.

All right people, lets do this thing.

Have a good one.

Calico Jack and I are terrible influences on each other. An extended session of taking the piss out of the up-and-coming game Bayonetta led to creating our own terrible version, then mashing her up with another joke character idea from a party a few weeks previous… which led to Jack writing a script, me doing some images with actual effort put in, and then us getting horribly, horribly carried away, fleshing out a full cast and ending up with a story we actually quite like.

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

If you’ve done much colouring in Photoshop, the chances are you will have come across selections and masking at some point—using the lassos and magic wand tools to cut out areas to work on to save you having to worry about colouring outside the lines and so on. In this set of tutorials I’m going to be teaching you the basics of using the next level up from that: quick mask, layer masks and clipping masks. These features are especially useful in photo-editing, but we can use them in illustration for some really handy shortcuts and effects. Rather than running a step by step on a specific final image, I’m going to be showing you around the basic techniques, so that you can use them in your own art however you like.

This lesson is going to introduce you to a tool called the quick mask. It’s kind of the middle ground selections and layer masks, and we can also use it to very quickly create a black-to-transparent lineart, something that can be incredibly useful to have.

(more…)

New site is GO! As you might have noticed, it’s had a complete overhaul, including moving it onto wordpress. I decided to consolidate my bloggery, so The ‘Tea and White Noise’ and blogger blogs have had their content moved over and I’ll just be posting here from now on. Admittedly I’m a little sad to put away the ‘Chaoslace’ and ‘Tea and White Noise’ names, but times are a-changing. (The latter might get used for something else though…)

A second entry in this journal comic nonsense thing between Sel and I. She still owes me comics.

So, the lovely Selena Thomas and I were supposed to be doing a back-and-fourth journal sketch comic thing. And it was taking too long to get started, so this happened:

Oh boy.