The Next Big Thing

I was recently invited to
 participate in the Next Big Thing blog series. I was invited by my friend and business partner Rae Francoeur who was in turn invited by June Shaw a blogger on http://murderousmusings.blogspot.com/ . I was asked to answer 

ten interview questions for the Next Big Thing about the book my wife and I are currently working on.



1. What is your working title of your book?

 Pyewackett of Salem.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

 The idea came from a visit to the Friendship here in Salem, MA. The friendship is a replica of a 18th-century Indiaman, a cargo ship that traveled to the far east. We were asking about the various imported spices and how they kept ever-present rats from spoiling the cargo. Although the sailors themselves sometimes would hunt rats with clubs to keep them in check, there was also a long tradition of having a ship's cat. These cats lived on board and not helped to preserve the cargo by hunting rats, but their presence also improved the morale of the crew.
British warships had ship's cats until 1977.

3. What genre does your book fall under? Children's Literature.



4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 
Well the main character is a cat, so I have no idea. For the role of Thomas the cabin boy, probably someone like young British actor Thomas Sangster. It would be nice to have known character actors play the captain and the first officer.



5.What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?


A ship's cat eye-view of a 19th-century sailing adventure as Pyewacket, a large, intelligent cat, and his new friend, Thomas the cabin-boy take their first sea voyage to Sumatra on the cargo vessel Friendship.

6.Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?


We are not represented by an agency, and are resistant to taking the self-publishing route. We submitted it to one local publisher who passed on it. It is now at a second publisher and we are waiting to see if they bite.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?


Well my wife wrote the initial draft in a couple of days, but we've been revising and refining it for about two years.


8.What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?



Probably Pirate Diary: The Journal of Jake Carpenter by Richard Platt (author) and illustrator Chris Riddell.

9.Who or what inspired you to write this book?


My wife and I own a particularly-large grey cat with a lot of personality, and it was not a great leap to imagine him as a ship's cat.M y wife came up with the idea of Pyewackett's first voyage coinciding with that of a young cabin boy named Thomas on the Friendship's trip to Sumatra in 1802.

10.What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
The book has a local-history connection. Although the voyages to the far east are well documented, the cat's-eye view of the trip will hopefully as a new angle.





Yes, I Do Maps

As you may know, if you follow my posts, I sometimes work for History Alive! a program run by the Gordon College Institute of Public History. One of the things that they run is Pioneer Village, located at Forest River Park in Salem, For years they have used this map of the village to guide tourists. Here is the old map:
 

Here is my take on the same map.

Although the old map is simple and gets the job done, I am trying to raise the bar by giving the map more detail and context, in a hope that it will entice prospective visitors by giving them a better idea of what to expect when they arrive there and to make it look like a more interesting and richer experience than the first map would indicate.

Henry Hudson and the Mermaid-Work in Progress

A few months ago I was reading about the English explorer Henry Hudson. (You know, he "discovered" Manhattan, the Hudson River and Hudson Bay are both named after him) I was surprised by a couple of things, one, that he disappeared in Hudson Bay after his crew mutinied and set him, his son, and a few loyal men adrift in a small open boat, that his remains were never found, and that in 1608, while sailing near Norway, he wrote in his logbook:

"This morning one of our companie looking over the boord saw a Mermaid...from Navill upward her back and breasts were like a woman's, her body as big as one of us; her skin was very white; and long haire hanging down behind, of color black; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse and speckled like a Macrell."

Hudson was one of few historical figures to not only site a mermaid but to make an entry of it in his log. This gave me an idea for a painting. So as soon as I read this I did a couple of small thumbnail drawings.

The first one was just to get the idea down. On the second one I started thinking more about the individual elements, composition, and lighting, making written notations on the thumbnail.The next step was research, collecting reference sailing images of ships of the period, costume, Henry Hudson, the Norwegian coastline, waves, mackerals and porpoises. Once I had that gathered I did a more finished drawing in pencil and marker to work out basic layout, lighting and colors.

As you can see the original sketch is pretty loose, and is much wider than I had originally planned. I was playing around at this stage with the size relationship between the mermaid and the ship. I wanted her to be close enough to the viewer to dominate the foreground, but not so large that you couldn't still make out the man on board the ship who is seeing her. At this point I did a more refined compositional and color study. I was also trying to decide at this point if I should include the text of the log entry in the painting itself, which would have made it a very narrow and vertically oriented painting. (I decided against it)



The final step, was to get the painting onto a panel. I used a 12" x 24" gessoed masonite panel.I drew in the image based on the sketches. As I was working , I decided to make the mermaid even larger than it appears on the sketch. I started with a just 2 colors, manganese blue and burnt sienna, roughing in the largest areas.



This is where I am at now. I will work in more detail and color as I go. I will post my progress as I go.























Here is the latest update on the painting...

Character Sketches

Here are some character sketches for a children's book I have been working on, "Piewacket, Ship's Cat of Salem". My wife Amy wrote the story, and she has been trying to get me to illustrate it for months. The story is about a ship's cat on board the Friendship, an early 19th century merchant ship that sailed from Salem, to Sumatra and other ports of call in southeast Asia, to trade for pepper and other spices. It was not uncommon for ships to have a ship's cat, in order to keep the rats and mice from eating or destroying the cargo. The cat in the story is based on our own cat Piewacket, who is a very large Russian Gray. The story is finished, but the artwork is definitely a work-in-progress. The top sketch is of the two main characters, Piwacket the cat, and Thomas, the cabin boy. Below are sketches for the Captain, a ship's rat, the Farmer, who brings the cat to the Friendship, and the First Mate.