You have probably heard this analogy already, but I came across it again recently and it’s a good reminder for when life seems to get in the way of life.

Take a large glass jar and fill it full of pebbles.  Is it full?  Yes of course.  Now take a handful of gravel and put it into the jar, where it trickles down between the stones.  Is the jar full now?  Take some sand and pour that into the jar, filling the spaces between the stones and gravel.  Full yet?  Not quite.  Take some water and pour that into the jar.  Now it’s full. The moral of the story, of course, is to put the stones in first.

The stones are the important things in life – writing, creating, doing something that takes you closer to your goals or values.  The gravel, sand and water are all the small things that need doing to keep life moving, but can easily take over your day.  How many days do we fill the jar with sand and gravel and find that yet again there is no room for the rocks? Or, put it another way, if your days seem like endless jars of sand, never forget that the most creative and inspirational people are not necessarily those who have most free time on their hands.

So when you meet someone at a Christmas party who says “Yes, well, I’d love to write a book/sail round the world/take up painting, but of course I don’t have the time,” you can give them a good slap.  Or a jar of sand.

As Ellen MacArthur (and many others) have said: “Goals are just dreams with deadlines.” I’d better go and collect some pebbles…..

The snow seems to have passed us by here in west Wales so far, but it’s still cold enough to need plenty of extra chocolate and a glass of something festive to keep out the cold.  Have a peaceful Christmas, everyone, and I’ll leave you with a Christmas quacker….

My favourite Blackadder episode is the one where Samuel Johnson tries to get royal patronage for the first English Dictionary.  When told that the book has taken Dr Johnson ten years Prince George replies, “Yes, well, I’m a slow reader myself.”  Those of you familiar with the rest of the episode will understand why in our family we love Baldrick’s definition of the letter C – “Big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in”.

Enough of that, but books are on my mind.  A Radio 2 DJ (naming no names but she’s young and was on late Saturday afternoon) made me cringe when she was talking about television and said something like, “Oh dear, if there’s nothing on tv I might have to go and read a book!”   I know it’s only banter, but it’s sad to think that reading is perceived as the last resort in the pecking order of how to spend time.  Given the danger facing libraries due to public spending cuts, I think we should make more fuss about how special books are.

Rather than witter on and preach to the converted, I’ve been on the hunt for ten good quotes about books:

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” (Mark Twain)

“Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labelled ‘This could change your life’. ” (Groucho Marx)

“A house without books is like a room without windows.” (Heinrich Mann)

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” (Richard Steele)

“You do not have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.” (Ghandi)

“Books – the children of the brain.”  (Jonathan Swift)

“I’m going to chop off the bottom of your trouser leg and take it to the library.  There’s a turn up for the books.” (Tommy Cooper)  Sorry about that one, couldn’t resist it!

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.” (Salman Rushdie)

“As long as we have books, we are not alone.”

Finally, here’s my favourite -

“Books are lighthouses erected in the sea of time.” (E P Whipple)

If it’s any consolation, I came across an extract of an article by John Ruskin who, over a century ago, bemoaned the fact that more money was spent on horses than on libraries.  It’s up to all of us, of course, to support our libraries and bookshops by using them.  Unless of course anyone out there has a cunning plan….

I’ll let Michael Rosen have the last word on the importance of books, especially when it comes to developing young minds.  His comments to the Guardian on the closure of libraries is summarised here: http://notesfromtheslushpile.blogspot.com/2010/12/bye-bye-libraries-bye-bye-civilization.html.   You do rather hope that eventually the powers that be realise that nothing improves literacy like…. um…reading!

Being surrounded by exceptionally talented people can make you feel a) despondent; b) inspired or c) a mixture of both.  The way to stay sane when attending a SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference is to soak up as much information and advice as your brain can handle while at the same time hanging on to your self belief that you’re in the right place at the right time.   What’s great is that people who are at the top of their game in the business are so encouraging and thorough in helping other people to succeed too.

So, what did I learn?

1.  That I need to put more images in my blog and avoid huge chunks of text.  (oh, ok then.  Here’s a pic.  Better?  Now carry on reading)

One of the new seasonal cards for sailors....

 2.  That it’s ok to be eccentric, silly or flamboyant.  In fact it’s useful if you want people to buy your books.  Phew.

3.  That the worst thing you can do as a writer is write boring stuff.

4.  That professionals give brilliant critiques, dismantling your story with such skill and care that you feel at the end as though you’ve had a makeover and shed loads of excess baggage.

5. That I now have even more entertaining blogs, posts and websites to follow that I did before (like Nick Cross, www.whoatemybrain.com, Lynne Chapman ‘An Illustrator’s Life for Me’,  www.lynnechapman.blogspot.com and several more but that’ll do for starters or I’ll end up being guilty of the large chunks of text thing again)

6.  That it’s ok, in fact quite useful,  to think like a ten year old (Good – does that mean I can stop wondering what to do when I grow up?).

7.  That everyone is talented in a totally different way.

8.  That publishers really, really want to find something spectacularly good on their slushpile.

9.  That getting it wrong is just something that happens on the road to getting it right.

10.  That to sell books you need to be a tart and flaunt your front cover at every opportunity.  (oh, ok.  Here it is again – what every child from 8 to 80 needs to know about marine conservation….. not quite ready in time for Christmas, but I think it will be January, with the official launch in March)

So now it’s back to the drawing board – currently on The List are:  drawings for the next Yachts & Yachting magazine, drawings for a brand new magazine coming out in March (more details soon), drawings for the German publisher of  RYA Go Inland who wants the British narrowboats replaced by something more European, unsurprisingly.  And the heap of Christmas commissions that aren’t quite finished, along with half finished paintings for the studio exhibition.  Perhaps I should get off the keyboard and pick up a pencil.  Time to put the kettle on, then.

Normal people decide they want to do for a living.  They then go and find out how to do it, do some training, go for interviews or pitch for work, and then spend their productive years putting it all into practice.  And, ideally, getting paid for it.  It’s entirely logical, but I’ve never quite managed it, having come at all my career choices the wrong way round – by doing first and learning second.  A student studying illustration at art college emailed recently, asking for tips on how to make a career out of illustration.   “Do everything that I didn’t do”, was the only advice I could give, having drifted into an artistic career almost by accident.  I didn’t know I wanted to be an illustrator until I already was one and suddenly noticed that being paid (occasionally) for sitting on a chair doodling and colouring in was quite enjoyable.  Being an author, too, was not something I aspired to before being asked if I could also write the series of books I was initially being commissioned to illustrate.   (Well I wasn’t going to say no, was I!)

The only drawback with stumbling into your career choice through the back door is that you feel like the person who sneaked into the party through the kitchen because they weren’t on the official guest list.  Ah well, blagging has got me this far in life, so it will do me for a bit longer whilst I carry on swotting up on the real skills I need to join the party properly!   I’m a great believer in the power of learning on the job, especially as the more your learn, the more you realise there is to know.

Which is why I’m off to a conference in Winchester in a couple of weeks’ time for Childrens’ Writers and Illustrators.  Because I think I’d quite like to make a career of it, if that’s quite all right with everyone,  and after six books it’s high time, if not well overdue, to find out what writing and illustrating for children is really all about. There’s an opportunity at the conference for illustrators to exhibit their portfolios, which sounds like an excellent idea. Except for one thing – I don’t have a portfolio.  (see what I mean about doing everything backwards?)  Well…. nobody’s ever asked me for one. An illustrator’s portfolio is what you put all your samples in, your commissioned work, your ideas and sketches so that a client can see how brilliant you are. That’s how the business works, apparently.  Hmm, perhaps I should be asking my art student for advice on how to put a portfolio together.  Better late than never?

In the meantime, one of the side effects of having been immersed in drawing and writing about marine conservation for so long is that there are still sea creatures falling off the end of my pencil.  Not that I’m complaining; it’s opened up a whole new world.  Here’s the pendant I commissioned clever Phillipa Lawrence to make for my jewellery range, inspired by the albatross and the Southern Ocean.

A sprinkling of seabirds and sea mammals then jumped onto the design for next year’s year planner…….. (did I mention that it’s now available from the starfishbooks website?  Just in case you might happen to want one)

That’ll do for now. I’ll be giving my pencil another shake next week and hoping some boats fall off it as it’s time to tackle The List, which includes a series of Christmas commissions.  Oops, and I need to plan a Christmas exhibition.  Pass me the pencil sharpener and a glass of wine….

I used to imagine that finishing a book meant typing the final full stop, leaning back in the chair with a sigh of satisfaction, walking to the post box with a large envelope and a spring in your step, pouring oneself a congratulatory drink then nipping out to buy something tasty to wear for the launch party.    Hmmm, not quite.  Well, not at all.  Apart from the fact that email attachments have replaced the bulging package, you have to brace yourself for the six weeks or so of edits, proofs, tweaks, extra bits, panicky lost bits, page number shuffling, and general  email-mayhem that follows the final full stop.  So have I finally finished now?   I can’t guarantee it, but all has been quiet on the inbox front this last week, so I rather hope so.  The sooner it goes off to print, the sooner it comes back and I can hold a copy in my hand.  I won’t actually look inside it of course – I’d be too scared of finding some howling error that I missed, for one thing.   It does make me wonder how this lengthy but essential proofing and editing process was managed before electronic wizadry made frantic four way conversations between publisher, editor, typesetter and author possible. One thing stays the same over time, and that’s everyone’s desire to make a book as good as it can possibly be. 

The end of one thing is always the beginning of something else, so I took a deep breath and looked at my list of ‘things to do after Go Green is finished’.  It includes practical things like ‘tidy up studio’ amongst creative things like ‘new work for Christmas exhibitions’ (easier said than done – I think I’ve forgotten how to paint pictures!) and ‘design more cartoon cards’ (triggering instant sense of humour failure).  Tidying the studio was a good start but I’ve messed it up again since, trying to dig out half finished ideas for paintings and working out what I’ve got frames for. 

Another item on the list is deceptively simple – “Ideas for next book”.  What, go through all that again?  Well, it beats having a proper job.  More news on that next time, once I’ve had a rummage in the creative cupboard and made sure there’s still something in there.

At least some things don’t change in the world of publishing – a glass of blogger’s ruin is going down nicely, thank you.

There’s good timing and there’s bad timing.  Recently back from the ten day marathon that is the Southampton Boat Show, good timing is when you walk onto a stand just as champagne is being popped and all the people you need to meet are there and free to talk. 

Bad timing is when, after a long day at the show and arriving back at our friends’ house in Hamble, we discovered that our hosts were out for the evening and our spare key was safely attached to Perry’s car keys.  Which were on the dressing table.  In the house.  Great.  At least, thanks to the wonders of wifi, we were able to check emails whilst parked outside the house.  But this had to be the night that, after a quiet few weeks on the email front, my inbox unleashed a flurry of messages with last minute edits and queries on my book, currently at the typesetters.  Sitting in a car in the dark is not the ideal place to write the back blurb for the book, remember what cover design we finally agreed on, and suggest a way of getting rid of the blank page after chapter 7.  I did have my working copy of the book with me – but it was in the house, along with the password and log in details for the project management programme that we’re using to communicate between all those involved.

I did the best I could in the circumstances before we gave up and headed off to the pub for some much needed supper.  So if you wonder what the two figures lit only by the glow of a laptop were doing in a Fiat Punto in Hamble last Wednesday night, now you know.   By the time we finished supper, our hosts were home and we were able to go inside and relax, making sure we didn’t forget the keys again.  Of course, for the rest of the week my emails, diligently checked every evening, contained nothing urgent at all.  That’s life.

The boat show gave me the opportunity to have a productive meeting with my bosses at the RYA.  I’ve decided that the two nicest things a publisher can say to an author are:

1.  “We’d like to commission to you write a book about…….”

2.  “We’d like to hear your ideas for the launch party…..”

It’s the nine months slog inbetween these two conversations that are the hard bit.

If my frantic laptop activity in the Fiat Punto succeeded, I’ll have an image of the front cover to post on the blog fairly soon. Meanwhile, here’s me looking zonked at the show.  The wine is purely medicinal.

And the title of this blog?  Apparently Aristotle said it, along with ’excellence is not an act but a habit’.  I can’t think of anything remotely witty or profound to say about it for now, so I’ll quite while I’m ahead.  Time for another glass of something, I think.

I was at the County Show in the rain last week.  Not through choice; I wandered round the show with the same bemused look on my face that a farmer might have if he stumbled into a boat show.  There were children on ponies, large bulls being led round a field accompanied by men with clipboards, and ladies with high heels drinking pimms in the mud. 

I was there demonstrating watercolours in the Learning Pembrokeshire tent, where the great British (or Welsh) public could find out all the marvellous subjects on offer at adult education classes.  Generally people are interested and delightful when I splash paint around in public but there’s always an exception.  I was painting a scene from my sketchbook, not expecting wonders as the drizzle coming into the tent was stopping the paint from drying.  A chap peered at what I was doing and announced, ‘That’s cheating!’.  Eh?  I looked up at him, waiting for this expert to tell me where I’ve been going wrong all these years.  ‘You’re supposed to make it up out of your head’, he said, waggling a finger at me.  ‘It’s cheating copying from a drawing!’ .  In vain I told him it was my own drawing, and artists are often in the habit of going outdoors and… well, drawing things.  It’s what we do. 

I daren’t let him near my studio; he would probably tear up my tracing paper and use it as kindling to burn the light box.  Remind me never to admit to using reference images from google.  I realised that there was no point arguing and explaining that if you want to draw something and don’t know what it looks like, go and find out.  

As it happens, I have been painting from the imagination recently, as a holiday from the relentless demands of  book illustration.  This was from a bigger piece called ‘Hand, heart, eye’, which, as it happens, are the three things David Hockney says you need to be able to draw.  The picture here is only an extract  – not because I’m trying to be arty but because I only have an A4 scanner.  Usually my big paint brushes only get used for getting the biscuit crumbs off my laptop keyboard, but I took myself off to a day’s painting workshop with the excellent Elizabeth Haines a few weeks ago, a great opportunity to get shaken out of my comfort zone.

Hand, heart and eye – I like that.  It’s the ‘heart’ element that takes a drawing beyond copying.

Artistic people have the knack of making ordinary things beautiful.  Last week I went to a concert in Goodwick, at a church overlooking the bay.  It was an overcast evening, grey light on a grey sea and the breakwater cutting across the centre of the bay.  There was half an hour before the concert started and Elizabeth Haines (www.elizabethhaines.co.uk) was sketching the view.  Through her eyes and hand, the dull expanse of bay came alive in a swirling pencil sketch of subtle tones.  Half an hour later and the same alchemy was happening through the voice of baritone Richard Parry (www.dramaticsongrecital.co.uk) as he acted and sang his way through the cleverly composed musical drama ‘An Act of Piracy’.  Wonderful – he could have sung a shopping list and it would have sounded good.  It’s always a challenge to try and sketch moving figures, especially when they’re singing and acting,  but it’s fun to try – after all, I need the practice!  With apologies to Richard who is much better looking in the flesh that he is in my sketchbook.

Meanwhile, back in the studio:

Some people have bad hair days.  Illustrators have bad pencil days.  Sometimes I forget how to draw, which is rather inconvenient.  I looked at yesterday’s drawings and two, possibly three of them needed doing again.  There’s no excuse; sometimes you just know that pencil, hand and eye haven’t quite made the connection.  When this happens I doggedly finish the drawing, ignoring the voice in my head telling me not to bother as it’s going to end up in the bin.  This was the version I tried to persuade myself would do:

It won’t, of course.  You’ll have spotted that the arms are too long for a start and it just lacks a certain something.  In the bin it went, and I returned to the original reference sketch (drawn from a photo of James modelling for me, somewhat reluctantly).   Second attempt – that’s better.    In case you were wondering, the illustration is for a page about marine scientists conducting research.  Caption is: ‘Right, now the next question…..’

 Ah well, life’s a journey.  On my headstone I want the words “Bother, I was just getting the hang of it!”

It’s hard not to take weather personally.  I know it’s pure coincidence that June’s hot spell lasted long enough to get ‘Torhilda’ painted, varnished and slipped gently back into the wet stuff at Llanion boatyard.  She had just settled prettily on her new mooring when the first low pressure system of the summer revved up over the Atlantic and swooped, wet and windy, accompanied by all its gale-infested little friends.  Trip to North Cornwall – cancelled.  Charts and tide tables put to one side.  Perhaps August will be brighter, we say, ever hopeful.   Why do we have a hobby that takes all our available cash and time and that we hardly ever get to do?  That’s a rhetorical question, as any boat owner will tell you. 

Living in a house looking at the forecast on the internet makes you cautious, but if your boat is also your home, you take the weather in your stride.  In the days when I lived on board my 24′ gaff cutter, it was a lot easier to get on with in and not spend too much time fretting over isobars.  I recall a windy trip up channel in ‘Kitty’ one year, coming back from the festival of sail in Brest and setting off from Weymouth, more or less happily, with a force 9 blowing.  Not as mad as it sounds, as the wind was behind us, it was a short coastal hop and the gale was due to ease by the time we got into the shelter of the Solent.    Dealing with rough weather when you’ve already got your sealegs is much easier than sitting indoors with the wind rattling the windows and deciding that you can’t possibly sail today because the ironing needs doing. 

Which is why I’m always fascinated and impressed by that rare breed of sailors who deliberately put themselves in the worst conditions that the oceans can throw at them – offshore racing, especially singlehanded, is as tough as sailing gets and a stark contrast to the gin and tonic pottering about that most of us do.  Sailors like Mike Golding find the extreme conditions of the southern ocean as beautiful and compelling as they are challenging.  My current book (the one everyone wishes I’d get on and finish so I stop going on about it) features a double page spread of Mike’s views on the southern ocean, a humbling and valuable perspective on one of the last true wild places on earth.  I wanted to do a picture of ‘Ecover’, Mike’s Open 60, romping over the waves, albatross in attendance.  It took a few attempts but I got there in the end. 

Back to my world of reading, drawing, researching, writing, singing and dreaming about the sea in all its forms.  Perhaps I should throw buckets of cold water over my head for more authenticity… or go sailing more often, perhaps.   I’ll work on it.

If you’re not into watercolours I recommend a click of the mouse now before your eyes glaze over.  For those who find sketching outdoors strangely exciting and challenging, here’s another of my colour mixing rants.  It was the last day of term today for my art classes, and it’s become a tradition to escape the classroom and spend the time sketching in Llawhaden castle grounds.  Sketching outdoors refreshes the parts that copying photos can’t reach, as well as waking up your colour sense.  How do you paint a stone wall?  Is it light or dark?  Warm or cool?  It’s usually all these things, speckled with white patches of lichen just to make the task even more tricky. 

Letting patches of alizarin, cobalt and raw sienna blend on the page gets you the soft mixed shades of old stone.   Other variations of the three primaries could be used to get similar effects.  More blue in the shadows, more sienna in the sunny spots.  Plenty of white patches of paper left exposed for the lichen.  In the studio you can see what you’re doing, tubes are clearly labelled and there’s a nice big white palette (cunningly disguised as a ten pence white china plate from a charity shop) to mix puddles of colour in.  But when you’re sitting on a wobbly stool with the wind blowing and your pocket paintbox on your knee, it’s not so easy, especially when you look at the range of colours in the average ‘beginners’ sketching boxes.  Gill had 24 colours in her box, most of them unused and unusable.  Four shades of insipid pink, 4 blues all very similar but no windsor blue.  Umpteen sludgy browns, all indistuingishable.   Give it to your grandchildren and start again, I said.  You need the same colours in your field palette as you do in the studio, otherwise you might as well mix your colours blindfold.  Get half a dozen artists quality half pans in a paintbox and give yourself a chance.  The more limited the colour choices, the better your chances of consistency and remembering which colour does what.  Sketching outdoors is challenging enough, what with wind, weather, nowhere to put stuff, tourists getting in the way, getting a numb bum sitting on rocks, and insects landing on your sketchbook.  It’s tough out there, folks. 

So if all those pretty paintboxes with their dozens of obscure colours are all hitting the bins tonight, it’s all my fault.  My own paintbox is messy, but it works.  It’s still got more colours in it than I tend to use, but generally it’s easy to plonk the brush in roughly the right place when working at speed. 

Colours most used?  Raw sienna, cobalt blue, windsor blue, ultramarine, alizarin, aureolin, light red, cobalt violet, cadmium yellow.  So that’s two reds, two blues, three yellows and a voilet.  The palette could do with a wash, though, couldn’t it.  Glass of wine first, I think.