Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
[0:10] Now today I want to take you on a journey into an underwater kingdom because I'm joined by Burley Doherty and Tamsin Rosewell who have collaborated together on this beautiful book, The Sea Maidens Odyssey. Fantasy and the first thing when you pick up this book you'll notice is it's just beautifully produced full of wonderful illustrations done by Tamsin and Burley has reinterpreted what we might call as the mermaid story for our era but before we swim off into mermaid business I wanted to ask you about the fantasy books that inspired you when you were growing up and rather than talk about the writers. I wondered if you wanted to mention any illustrators that really have stuck with you over time. For example, like I remember the illustrations in the Children of Green Know and obviously the Narnia, the Pauline Baines illustrations and Tolkien's illustrations. Do you have your own favorites that you immediately summon up when you think about children's fantasy books?
[1:20] I'll ask first our artist among us, and that's Tamsin.
[1:25] Thank you, Julia. Yeah, it's a really interesting question because I think for me, it's always been the images that come first. So I'm a huge follower of William Blake's, for example, whereas where my colleagues at the Blake Society, you know, talk about the books that they like of his and the, you know, quotes and things. For me, it was always, always the images.
[1:44] I do have a couple of really early memories of images. One is of, I think I must have been about two or three, really, really young. I remember sitting on my grandmother's rug as a very young child with an enormous family Bible, probably a Doré Bible. And I remember being really frightened by the picture of the Witch of Endor. But sort of delightfully frightened, deliciously frightened by it in a, you know, M.R. James sort of pleasing terror kind of way. so that's a really vivid memory um and i think you know i've always liked that kind of creepy sinister atmospheric illustration since then and the other is actually only a few years later for my fourth birthday i was given errol lecane's thorn rose which is his retelling of um a sleeping beauty and i just remember being dazzled by the illustrations i couldn't read at that age and i I didn't really need to, I just poured over the detail in them, the level of, you know, the colour,
[2:43] the intricacy of the images and everything was illustrated, all the borders, everything. And I just loved it. And, you know, I actually dedicated this book, you know, in my corner to Errol LeCain because that really was a formative moment for me.
[2:57] Now, Burleigh, I suspect that you might be more of a word person than a drawing person, but do you have some favorite images from books when you were growing up? Well, yes. I mean, we weren't a household of books. We didn't have books at home at all when I was a child. It wasn't until I was about nine or ten, my big sister, who was 13 years older than me, used to buy me books.
[3:23] So I didn't own any. We used to get books in the library. Dad and I used to get books in the library. But I loved, I of course didn't know at that time the names of illustrators, but I did love fairy tales and they would be books that we got from the library. And when I see Walter Crane illustrations, for instance, and Arthur Rackham, then I do recognize them from when I was little, the beautiful. I loved color plate. and you didn't have illustrations that seeped across the page and across the margins that I was aware of anyway. But there was one illustration in particular that I loved fairy tales, but there was one story that I couldn't bear to have read to me because the illustration terrified me. It was a story of Bluebeard. I loved the name Bluebeard. It's a beautiful name.
[4:21] But the illustration of when the door is is opened that she mustn't open and and all the maidens are hanging oh dear I can visualize it now it's never left me I used to put my hand over I didn't want to see that page at all I can completely understand because it's it's a very dark story that one yeah without an illustration so yeah so for the sea maiden's odyssey um the style of uh illustration is silhouettes on a very beautifully drawn background um and it's reminiscent if you um i was thinking of yan piankowski i particularly remembered him illustrating a joan atkins series of stories called the necklace of raindrops i always used to go to that bit of the shelf in the library and pick that off just to look at the illustrations the magic of the raindrops and the illustrations.
[5:20] So Tamsin is that the Jan Pienkowski approach is that one you always take or is it just for this book? A kind of combination of both. I was lucky enough to really get to know Jan a little and David not long before you know Jan's death and you know got to talk to him and spend some time with him and, um yeah absolutely he's been a huge influence in my life and i love those you know books of his and david's and also you know his illustrations to jane atkins work is amazing but you know as a silhouette artist and he didn't only do silhouette at all um he's actually following on in a really long tradition of illustrative work which is particularly the telling of fairy tales and mythology i think um in silhouette and we can trace that right back i mean you know barely mentioned Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham, and certainly both of those were using silhouettes as well.
[6:13] But we can trace it back even further through 18th century fashions for silhouettes art in other countries, the shadow puppet tellings of the Ramayana and sort of cycles of mythology. We can even trace it back to ancient Greece, to all those vases with silhouettes of sirens and the telling of Odysseus, even back to cave art, you know, those are really early images. So I think it's always been with us in the form of storytelling and it just seemed to fit perfectly. Although it's not where we started, Burleigh and I started, you know, the conversations about illustration somewhere really quite different, looking at colour and form and what these sea maidens looked like. And it was actually the designer, Becky Chilcott, who said, I think you should try working in silhouette because I think it'll offset the idea of, a really contemporary retelling of fairy tales, mythology, really, really nice. It'll kind of blend it all together. So that's where we went. Yes, it does definitely give it that classic fairy tale feel, but also it means that the great thing about Silhouette is you're not telling
[7:22] us what someone looks like and you can then project what you want onto that. So, okay, let's talk a little bit about the story. So, Belle, do you want to tell us the outline of the tale that someone will get when they pick up The Sea Maiden's Odyssey?
[7:39] Oh, okay. It's a story within a frame, a contemporary frame, of a young woman who's working in a sea life sanctuary, sea world sanctuary, and a strange and very beautiful sea creature is brought to the sanctuary, she is on duty and it becomes something that she has to care for. And it's not a fish. It has the looks of a fish, but in glorious colours and wonderful, intriguing strands. But the extraordinary thing about it is that it has the face of a young woman and has hands and gradually as the relationship develops this caring relationship they begin to speak to each other to talk to each other and in the end.
[8:36] The sea maiden that has been brought in is encouraged to tell her story in exchange for something very, very precious. And what the girl who works in the sanctuary, what the young woman who works in the sanctuary wants to know, the question she's asked her is, what is your community like? What is your way of life? What is your family? And this is a story that emerges when we enter into the real text. And they are people, sea people, sea maidens, sea creatures, sea folk, I don't know what you want to call them.
[9:23] But who live within the vastness of the ocean and communicate with each other from time to time. They are one big family. And our attention is focused on the youngest, the very youngest of the people, the sea people, and her beloved older sister who has been kidnapped, has been stolen, captured by sea men, by fishermen working on the sea, menfolk, who take her sister away. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen.
[10:06] And the young C girl, whose name is Merrin, when she's approaching young womanhood, is asked to do something which she cannot accept by her father. And she's not ready. And she needs to leave the family. She needs to get away and be on her own. and she goes into the depths of the underwater caves, caverns and tunnels, a maze of tunnels, and fetches up. In a pool on a mountainside and can't escape from it. So she's there on her own in this bleak pool which has none of the life of the ocean in it. And I don't want to tell you any more than that. No, that's very good. We must leave it on a cliffhanger.
[10:57] So just to give people an idea of a structure, because a lot of people listening to this are aspiring to write, it's got similarities to the Frankenstein structure with the outer layer of the sort of scientific world, then the story of somebody inside that and then in the heart of it there's a story of the the lost the lost sister who's had the sort of worst experience and then moves back out again to the back to the outer layer and they all interconnect so it's a beautifully um organized book you're obviously writing in the shadow of other myths and legends about mermaids and you've purposely gone for the alternative term of sea maiden and for a different iteration of the physicality of mermaid.
[11:44] Do you want to tell us a little bit about your thinking around that? Yes, it's something that Tamsin and I both agreed on immediately of starting to launch into this book.
[11:58] Well, at first we did think we were creating a book for much younger readers and it was our our publisher, Hazel Holmes at UCLan, who said it, and I'd love it to be for young teenagers. So a vastly different story from the one that I had in my head originally. But even so, in when we were thinking of perhaps for six-year-olds, we knew we didn't want to write to create something about a sparkly mermaid with, the mirror and the conch and all sequins. Singing on a rock. Singing on a rock and Disneyfied. We didn't want that. We wanted to look at some creature who would be like us in many ways, emotionally just relating to people like ourselves, but other, another creature, another community.
[12:53] So the the word sea um mermaid just was wrong because it had the wrong connotations for us so that's why we developed the idea of a sea maiden and time said you want to say about the lack of a single fishtail in the sort of fish you buy from sainsbury's kind of um yeah no absolutely i'm that you burley's right that the word mermaid is actually very loaded and I think this is a conversation I have with other writers as well, particularly if they're writing about fairies. We've got exactly the same problem with the word fairy. So nowadays, probably people listening to this podcast will know that fairy law and mermaid law is actually really dark. These things have always been about the other. They've been about the distressing elements of humanity. And yet somehow we've got to this place where everything is sparkly and sequined and we didn't want to start there. But Burleigh and I did both start with the folklore, we started talking about how we have this history, folkloric history of inland mermaids. We've still got places called Mermaid Pool, with references to Mermaid Pool, but far inland, so we must have had it at one point, and then from my point of view I started thinking about the way a mermaid.
[14:13] Would look and for me I think they probably sit in the folkloric realm more comfortably alongside.
[14:22] Cryptids or monsters in fact in that they're very very physical so unlike a ghost or a fairy which you might be able to summon but you couldn't grab it in a net and put it in an exhibition in the same way we knew we were starting with something physical so we had quite a fun and interesting conversation very early on about, you know, if we had evolved to be aquatic, what would we actually look like? And we realised we probably look something like manatees, you know, things like necks and hair and fingers are actually pretty useless underwater. But then we're not in that realm, we are in the realm of fiction. So we then were able to add back in what we wanted. We knew, you know, there's lots of descriptions of Merrin feeling her way through unfamiliar dark caverns so we knew they needed fingers. We wanted them to look very other but very beautiful in their own way so we didn't want to add the sequins and then I think Burley actually came up with the idea of them almost looking like tropical fish with these frills with these extraordinary you know the sense of movement and for me as an artist I can add that movement in the in you know which is almost in lieu of colour I think in that when you're working in silhouette, you can add in a huge amount of atmosphere using those frills. So they do indeed have fishtails, but it's not fishtails with that sort of classic fin, divided fin at the back.
[15:48] It's almost like fabric drapery in that, as you were saying, in the tropical fish wave, you just think of an aquarium with the flowing movement that you see in tropical fish. So it's not right to say they don't have fishtail, is it? It's more that it's a new sort to get away from the silhouette, which we all know so well, and the, you know, the, There's a strangeness, I think, to, you know, one of the appeals of tropical fish is the strangeness of them, that, you know, that they do have a kind of a fairy quality, don't they? That they seem to be slightly ethereal and not, it's certainly not quite, you know, of this realm. And I think we wanted to capture that. And I think those frills do that. And then after that conversation, they worked their way into the text as well. I began to see drafts in Berlin, which the frills, you know, things were caught in the frills. Because it's so graceful it added such elegance to Tamsin's illustrations as well and it did replace the colour when we first started Tamsin was sending me amazing illustrations using her incredible colour palette beautiful beautiful colours and suddenly I was getting black and white.
[17:03] Silhouettes and I thought What's happened to the colour? Of course, the colour comes back in in the background. But almost replacing that is this elegance of shape and form, which embodies movement. Yeah, it's a lovely, lovely touch. So it's in many ways a coming-of-age story, as mermaid tales often are. And in the classic Little Mermaid tale, it's about a mermaid changing themselves
[17:33] to fit a man and a man's world in painful and sad ways. You're obviously taking a different approach to the relationship to men and menfolk and women and womenfolk. Do you want to say a little bit about that aspect to it? Because it does seem a major theme. Without giving too much away, Bertley, I don't know if you don't want to spoil the end, but is it fair to say it's about sisters and sisterhood? It's very much about family and sisters, especially the female line through from the grandmother and the mother and the grandchildren, the grandgirls.
[18:12] Yes, there is a strong element of love in it. And there is a point at which she has to choose. She really does have to choose between her, and is very conflicted, between the love that's being shown to her by virtually the only person who seems to want to really get to know her, a young farmer who comes to the pool, the inland pool regularly.
[18:39] And her desire to return home, her feeling that she is now ready to return home not to be tied to a land person in some way she belongs to the ocean she belongs to the sea and that's the big kind of conflict and pull in the story and it is in both senses to do with love and what feels right the right thing for her to do as well the love of her community so i think it's like the perfect gift i mean it's could be read by anybody of course but But I would say it's a perfect gift for a young teen or a middle grade reader, a girl who's thinking through these things. It's very good, I think, talking about doing things when you're ready is another theme I sort of picked out. The other part of the title which we should pause over is the word Odyssey, of course, which has its roots back in Odysseus and the Homer's Odyssey, which is a sea voyage as well. What made you pick that as the title? Is there a connection to that story that you see? Well, there is in the sense that it is a journey, a very eventful journey, both emotionally and physically eventful journey that she has to make in order to become herself.
[20:03] And we went through three or four different kinds of titles, which I kept throwing backwards and forwards. And then the journey of the sea maiden cropped up and that didn't seem quite, it was nearly there but not quite and then I hit on the word odyssey and felt that's the word I want to use. It gives it that kind of weight and it's a very significant journey that she makes. So I went for that and immediately a positive response for once. And it seems to like the reverse so it's like a female version of an odyssey because.
[20:45] Odysseus is going from land through the sea to go home to the land and and Erin is doing the opposite um yeah and many of the encounters in the odyssey with Circe and others these sea creatures feel like those it's like telling it from the monster's point of view they're not monsters but you know the other the other point of view so i enjoyed the thinking about the literary connections um that that choice raised for me okay so we're talking here about two people who are collaborating together um writing a book can be a very lonely business so did you actually have the whole text first burly or did you um sort of do little did you send little installments or did you sometimes write to an illustration. How did it work? Oh, it's hard to remember now, but except that we both knew that we wanted to work on a book together because Tamsin and I had met for the first time when we were launching The Haunted Hills, which Tamsin had done the cover artwork and inside black and white illustrations for. And subsequently two more of my covers and we felt that we really understood each other and I loved her artwork.
[22:11] So I think we began just by talking about, Folk tales and fairy tales that interested. We just surrounded ourselves with folk and fairy tales. And Tamsin said, well, is there a local legend that you could perhaps work on? And then I thought of the mermaid pool, which is just below where I used to live in the Peak District. I lived just below the mermaid pool. It was just below Kinder. And that immediately appeals, that idea appealed to Tamsin and she is just an incredibly fast and versatile and thoughtful artist and immediately was kind of coming up with wonderful ideas.
[23:04] We should mention for those listening from abroad, the Peak District is nowhere near the sea. No, no, because it's as far away from the sea as you can get. Yeah. Yeah, in either direction, yeah, equidistant from the sea. Sort of Manchester down a bit. Yes. And across a bit. Down is fine. Yeah. There are in fact actually two pools up on the area of the piece which both have mermaid stories associated with them of different kinds and, you know, Burleigh has very heavily woven both of those elements of folklore into this narrative. There are two poles in this story, and they have different sorts of sea creatures in them, shall we say. Yeah.
[23:48] Without giving too much away yeah I think it's quite unusual for an author and an illustrator to work together in this way I think you know those of you yeah most most people you know who are listening who've got some experience approaching will probably know that what's normal is for an illustrator to be given perhaps an extract of a book when it's complete and not read the whole thing, but be told by a publisher, you know, we'd like something like this to other book covers, but in these colours perhaps, you know, this sort of template. And actually they're really not connected to the author and I just don't think I could work like that. We really worked on this from the beginning.
[24:37] Burleigh would send me drafts or email me about ideas for what happened in the plot and I would respond visually and sometimes you know that was an actual painting and other times um that was you know the what each plot point would um would be able to inspire visually so you know there's a scene in it which I don't want to spoil too much which is quite dramatic uh and involves you know somebody actually being raised up out of the water which is a wonderful image and so you know when she talked to me about that that's the way I responded it was, you know, verbally, but to say, this would make an amazing image, this, you know, I can imagine this, you know, in this way. So, yeah, it really was right from the beginning that the images and the words sort of kind of arrived pretty much together.
[25:28] One of the things that attracts people to listen to something like this is to actually find out how you do stuff. So, how do you actually draw? Tamsin what do you physically do when you're actually doing a picture in response to something Burleigh's said okay so I think the first thing to say which perhaps isn't necessarily obvious because by the time you're looking at it in a book you're never really going to be sure but I work traditionally and not digitally I'm not out of any great principle but because I'm not really I'm a very analogue person I love ink the painting which anyone watching on YouTube will see behind me is one of the images they're huge they're and this is on canvas it's ink on canvas with silhouette work cut out by hand on top. The huge advantage for me of working traditionally, not digitally, is that I end up with a whole series of physical objects. I've got nine canvases like this behind me and a whole folder of black and white, images that can go around and support the book and be part of that narrative, part of that discussion. People can look at them and think about, as you have, Julia, the representation and how they've been physically created.
[26:38] I tend to do a lot of what I call studies.
[26:42] So Burleigh and I spent quite a lot of time really outside of the conversation with publishers.
[26:49] You know, with toing and froing and me drawing different shapes of sea maidens and how frills might work and move and where the movement was and you know how they would be differentiated from each other and I'm a huge believer in the theory of do it again. I think Sarah Moss, the author Sarah Moss, literally takes her entire script and gets rid of it and then does it again. I don't think I'd go quite that far, but I really do, if something isn't quite right, I will just physically start again. So I'm quite a physical sort of interactor. I don't sit at a computer and do it digitally. I'm full on. I'm usually covered in ink as well. Yeah, and I think one of the things which is really lovely about your book is they're not, they are sensual creatures without being sexy. Because one of the problems about mermaids is the sort of, you know, shell breasts and the little tummy buttons, which make them feel like a teenage boy's dream as opposed to a real creature. And you just get rid of all of that with the beautiful outlines that you're using, which I found very refreshing, I must admit. And I should also mention that the publisher has actually spent on your book because you've got some wonderful gold foil highlights, which we all know is a little bit expensive, so it looks fantastic.
[28:13] Yeah, they really did go to town. I think, you know, it's worth saying again for those listening who aspire to write that when you're creating a book like this, there are more and more people involved than the author and the illustrator that you know our designer becky was a huge part of that conversation and really it's becky who absolutely went for it and would send me notes saying you know can you do me like a whole sheet of bubbles and i go okay and she you know got me to create all of the inky swirling backgrounds that you can see in that those different shades of blue which changed throughout the book and enabled her to separate the beginning of the book from the end of the book from that you know odyssey part in the middle um you know there are editorial discussions as well which you know obviously what Burley's you know not mine but there were you know I suppose Burley and I were kind of the nucleus a bit but actually the discussion was much much bigger yeah yeah I'm Kathy my uh editor is it was superb in her encouragement, but also in her pushing me further, as she kept saying. I've noticed that, so I'm being published by HarperCollins at the moment in a historical murder mystery, and they've just started putting at the end like a credits page, which they don't show me. I just opened the book, oh, wow, and it's got like you sitting in the cinema.
[29:41] Production team accountants like a whole page and I thought oh I wish they told me they're going to do this because I want to thank those people but I think it's a lovely idea to actually capture because I only really talk to my editor and maybe the copy editor but that's it but they're obviously working in massive teams who don't get any recognition so I don't think they've done that with your book I'll just quickly check at the back but it's that time we recognize.
[30:10] Yeah you know so do pay attention when you get to the end of a book if they do that yeah so um, We've talked about drawing, but Burleigh, are you a straight-on-to-a-computer gal, or are you a pen-and-paper gal? I'm pen-and-paper. Certainly for most of my books, unfortunately.
[30:38] Having recently moved, I can't find the book to write a book in, is what I call it. But when I've got a book in my mind, I go and buy a large book. It's got to have a nice cover, perhaps a William Morris print on the cover. And that's where my story begins. And sometimes it's just a random collection, not starting from the beginning and finishing at the end, but a random collection of ideas and notions and questions.
[31:07] But sometimes it does actually begin at the beginning and I flow it through. But it's always a scramble. And then eventually, of course, I do put it onto a computer. But yeah, that feeling of the connection to the pen and to the ink and it's flowing from you is a very powerful one and very different from the clack, clack, clack at a computer and a keypad and a screen. As we were talking about, just before we started the session, about the beautiful penmanship of some writers, fantasy writers, would you say your handwriting is beautiful in the way that Alan Garner's and Tolkien's was? No. Is it like a doctor's prescription? It's, I mean, I do, somewhere on my website there is a, a photograph, I think, of one of my pages. No, it's all a bit of a scroll in the end. It starts off very neatly. It gets more of a scroll. And I do write on every other line and every other page to allow for more ideas to be put in. But Tamsin's handwriting is beautiful. Ah, you didn't confess that. Is that something you've developed on purpose, Tamsin, as part of your visual?
[32:31] Um it probably was developed on purpose I think I write very carefully I'm very very left-handed and as a school child I was I really struggled to read so I've always been a quite a visual person and you know I remember in secondary school you know right you know nowadays you'd be diagnosed with dyslexia and there'll be support and there's wonderful Barrington Stoke books and And, you know, Oxford published something similar.
[32:59] And, you know, at the time I was just slow. I was the one who was rather left out of it. So, you know, I did. And I think I had to work really hard at make my handwriting legible. I can write backwards fluently, same way that William Blake had to on his plates. And I think that's a result of being very, very left-handed to my brain. Actually, I've realised I paint from right to left as well. So I think if you're right-handed and you write from left to right, it's natural that if you're left-handed, you'd write the other way, like mirror writing. So I think of it more as a party trick than anything useful. Well, Leonardo da Vinci got there first. He did, yes. I write backwards absolutely fluently. My writing has always been neater backwards than forwards.
[33:51] But interestingly, actually, I've also struggled with school maths, but with visual mathematics and geometry, I've no problem at all. In fact, maths is one of the first things you ask, how do I actually work? One of the very first things I do is actually rule out the mathematics of an image. And in the same way that a writer will know how to manage pace, how to inject urgency into scenes and where the tension needs to be, I've also got my eye on how people's eye will travel around the image, how, where the action's got to be taking place, whether I need it to be creepy or time of day, that kind of thing. And mathematics is a huge part of that. The opening image in the book is one in which I used a double Fibonacci sequence in order to gain.
[34:50] No, sorry, not that one, that the one of when Yana is taken on the boat where there's this raging sea I've created one spiral moving one way and another spiral moving the other way which centers on the moon and one end centers on her caught in the net and actually mathematically, the result of that is that if you're looking at it your eye doesn't quite know where to rest so I wanted that to almost give you a sense of being slightly seasick to increase the sense of movement and you can do that with mathematics but you've just got to not think about it just school mathematics yeah this is visual that's very encouraging for people out there who have struggled to be to do something that's a conventional way but has their own way of doing it that you find eventually do it unconventionally yeah um so people listening to this do you have any tips for those who wanting to get into the world of illustration or writing things that work for you in your own careers.
[35:46] Burleigh, we'll go to you first. How did you get to be a writer, I suppose? That's asking. Well, I just started. Just start. Yeah, I mean, don't think about it, just do. I've been writing since I was five, writing stories and poems, and it just is what I do, you know. It always has been. I was never going to be anything. You know, I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and everybody else knew I was going to be a writer.
[36:13] It's very it's very hard because um it's all very well wanting to be a writer but actually becoming a writer i agree isn't going to be um yes you and i both started a while ago maybe you were a little bit before me um and things have changed a lot there are new routes to being published but i think you're right to say that if you want to be a writer write something, it's amazing the number of people who come and say i've got a really good idea got a really good idea but you actually have to sit down and write it to see if you can sustain a whole story or a book or whatever it is you're aiming absolutely there's no there's no other way around it you just write it and yeah works or it doesn't work and you keep chair and be willing to change it be willing to redraft and redraft yeah and try and be easy to work with is the other thing which is the thing about agreeing to change things yeah yeah if you're really set in your ways it's very hard for people to help you make it something that's published. Because an outsider sees something that you don't see. You can't see it because you're kind of focused on your vision of something, but maybe you haven't expressed your vision of it. Properly. And how about you Tamsin? What would you say was a tip? Do you need to, for example, go to art college?
[37:30] No, I didn't go to art college at all. I'm of that generation where, you know, to go to art school, you have to have a foundation course and for both art school and the foundation course, you had to pay. There weren't grants available and I certainly didn't come from the kind of family that would have had the money to do that and probably wouldn't really have valued it either they you know I think they still probably thought that it was a it was a hobby rather than anything that could be a career so no I definitely didn't go to art school but I've always drawn it's always been a passion I I think actually everything that you've been discussing about writing also applies to illustration I think be flexible you know when your designer comes along and says oh I know you've done all these studies but I think you should work in silhouette give it a go I think you know it they often they're adding something that you can't see that you don't know in exactly the same way.
[38:20] I think with illustration, I think you've kind of got to be in, have the confidence to be in what I think of as a state of play all the time. You've got to have that energy and the fluidity and the joy pushed into it. If you've got to the stage when you're spending about 20 minutes doing one tiny bit of crosshatching and being really anxious that you're going to do it wrong, you're going to go wrong or make a mess of it then actually that's when it loses all the energy that's when it loses its character um and its form and actually it kind of dies on you know I think you know I think that that kind of confidence to just push through keep going and you know do what is right for you um you know what your vision is I think is incredibly important in illustration too.
[39:06] That's very good advice indeed. So we always finish with a little bit of fun, um, and we imagine all the fantasy worlds that we've ever watched or read or, uh, heard poems about or whatever it might be, um, that have been created.
[39:21] I'm going to ask you where you think it would be the best place to be a sea maiden or mermaid. You don't have to have them there already. You can drop them into some, a new place. where would you like to be a sea maiden? Which is the best place? Tamzin, do you want to kick off? I think there's a novel that was written in the mid to late 1800s, which I think is probably quite important to the Oxford world of fantasy, which is George MacDonald's Fantasties, which was a hugely important text for C.S. Lewis in particular and many others.
[40:02] I think I dropped some mermaids into Fantasties because what he's written I read now as it's a very political text it's quite feminist in its outlook that there are a lot of maidens a young man ends up in in the world of fairy and he meets all sorts of women on the way and you know these are denisms of the world of fairy but they're older women they're younger women, they're um you know they're associated with different sorts of places and they all actually offer him really sound advice and are intelligent beings and have their own destinies he ignores all of them to his detriment and to his fate but um i think actually if you're going to be a sea maiden to be in that environment where you are allowed your own personality and you're allowed to ask to give advice, I think that would be a better place than probably in Anderson's story, I'm afraid, nowadays. Yes.
[41:05] Yes, the hand pushing Anderson's story is a bit problematic, I think. Burleigh, how about you? Where would you like to be a sea maiden? Well, I think I'd like to be in the sky. If the sea wasn't my element, I think it would be the sky because it has its own currents and things fly instead of swim. And I just think it would be an extraordinary idea for a story. So you're reinventing the sea maiden to a sky maiden? I'm reinventing the element that she lives in and exploring a different kind of beauty and beauty.
[41:46] Another place that seems to have no boundaries no frontiers i remember asking because we i should confess here that we've done this conversation before and i failed uh some of the ai companion, nixed the recording and i remember you said um burley that you don't actually need to go into fantasy world you actually would rather like to be a mermaid and explore our real seas which have not been explored which i thought was a very good answer you don't yes i forgot what i said yeah i know i remembered i thought that's a really good answer i thought i'd hand it back to you and as for me i would um i'm afraid it's very much a sort of fairly predictable answer for me but i think there is a wonderful scope to be um a mermaid in the world of lord of the rings because you can go and visit the sunken world of numenor and you could swim over to the undying lands and explore all the, go up the rivers of, not too far.
[42:44] Of Middle Earth. And it would be just great fun. There doesn't seem to be, I'm not, I can't think of there being any mermaids in Lord of the Rings. I know there are the sort of Valar who have sort of power over the ocean. So maybe they have some Maya who are more like sea maidens. Anyone who knows, write in and tell me and I'll look up the references. But that's where I'd like to swim around go and visit Numenor under the sea, if you're going to write your sky imagens I'd love to paint the sky I can imagine them in the stars swimming through constellations.
[43:20] Yeah I'm totally in for that okay so look out guys for the sky Odyssey volume 2 thank you very much for joining me for this conversation today and And it's been lovely meeting you both. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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