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23 June 2015

Who is George Atkins?

15:07 | | Edit Post


...does anyone really know?


George Atkins is the eponymous hero of my novel George and the Dragon. Throughout the early stages of the narrative we get little clues as to what he looks like

Obviously I, as the author and creator of George, have my own idea of what he should look like. 

And I am sure people who have read the book each have their own idea of what he might look like. Many times I have found my idea of a given character challenged when I watch a film of a book or see a drawing of a character in that book.

Here I present to you the first ever drawing, that I am aware of, of George himself.
I actually think the artist has done a great job from my brief, although I think his head could be a stronger shade of ginger. That apart I'm so chuffed expect to see images of many of the other characters from George and the Dragon appear on my blog in the future.

What do you think? Have you attempted to draw him yourself? Fancy a go yourself let me know I may even let you have a copy of the novel for free! 

Phil


16 June 2015

Size matters...

00:03 | | Edit Post


...or how big is your dragon?


I recently posted this picture of a series of dragons onto the Facebook group Dragons are not just for Christmas.


If you're curious the link comes from here: 


This got me thinking. I've always maintained that Spitfire is a little bit bigger than Draco (No 9. above). With the regal dragons being a bit smaller.  I've also often though that Spitfire should have a wingspan of about twice that of a Spitfire.

The author of the blog post linked above puts Draco at about 5m tall when stood on all fours. But that didn't help me to size him that easily.  I needed more data and that came from here: 


I'm respecting the wish for the images not to be copied so pop on over have a look and come back.

What it tells me is that Draco has a wingspan of 73 ft and that converts to 22.25 m.

Here are the three main fighters from the Battle of Britain (as close to scale as I can get them) for comparison:
Spitfire - wingspan 11m

 Hurricane - wingspan 12m
Messerschmidt BF-109 - wingspan 9.9m

I was quite astonished by this revelation. Draco from Dragonheart has almost exactly twice the wingspan of a Spitfire fighter plane.

Spitfire the dragon is a little bigger than that and, drawn to scale, would look something like this:

If you compare him to the two allied fighters (Spitfire on the left, Hurricane on the right) they look something like this:


At least this is how I imagine him to be in my head.  It also gives me a good start when I try to figure out how big some of the characters in the second book in the Knights of the Sky series are.

Hope you found that enlightening.

Phil

1 June 2015

Channeling your inner author...

23:09 | | Edit Post

...or getting the words onto the page.


Stephen King makes a valid point in this quote.  I prefer to try and think of it as write a 1000 words a day and in 3 months you'll have written a novel.

At moment the still unnamed sequel to George and the Dragon has a word count of 71,879. George and the Dragon is around 105,000 words. I found these great info-graphics and just had to share them with you.






Back on subject my plan is to finish the first draft of the sequel before the end of the month. I expect it to be about the same length as my first novel so I've got about 35,000 words to write or about a 1000 a day.

I've come to the conclusion it's almost impossible for me to write at the weekends. I simply don't get a break from the family. It makes it impossible to get into the story and start to type it in to Scrivener.
So my usual time to write is on the train to and from work, that's about 40 minutes each way or 1hr 20 in total. I can hit 800 words on a good day in 40 minutes. However, as I've discussed before in this blog I find it really hard to write when I'm tired.

This evening I managed 148 words and then fell asleep on the train. Not a good way to start the month and to hit my target. So if you take out the weekends

I've got about twenty days and 1,500 words a day to complete. It's like a mini NaNoWriMo :)

Wish me luck.

 Phil
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