I hate Dell

I hate a wretched day today. Whilst my Dell desktop has been relatively trouble free since I bought it many years ago, my Dell laptop has been a utter pain.

It is a year old and has been away twice for pretty major repairs. In June it had everything but the keyboard replaced and came back with a new hard drive. I had to reinstall all the software apart from Windows. I switched it on yesterday to hear a high-pitched squeal and it refused to boot up.

I contacted Dell, to whom I have just paid a large amount of money for support. The man at the other end of a line that seemed to stretch a very long way indeed asked me to get a small Philips head screwdriver. He asked me to loosen a small screw behind the battery and the squealing stopped.

I have no idea why.

But nothing else worked. My keyboard has gone mad and is throwing the letters about the page at random and deleting things I've already typed - again at random. I was told that it must be a software problem and the money I had paid was for hardware support. I would have to pay extra for software support. Even though Dell put the software on and sold me the software and there is nothing on the laptop other than the software they themselves installed.

I have rather a tense relationship with bolshie inanimate objects.

I had to stop myself uninstalling the software with a hammer.

I'm ready for my close up. . .

Adrian Downie got in touch yesterday. Adrian is responsible for the lovely Tales of Terror website at Bloomsbury. He was asking me about what we might do for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth and saying that Bloomsbury have been shooting some videos for their website and putting them on YouTube.

Normally these take the form of a question and answer session with the author, but Adrian was wondering if we could do something a bit more interesting.

I'll keep you posted. . .

The Economist

A few posts back I was talking about my life in newspapers and mentioned that I used to work for The Economist every week between 1990 and 1996. As well as doing drawings for the various sections - Europe, Asia, America etc - we illustrators would also occasionally be asked to do the cover. These are a few of mine.

When I left college I had assumed I would work in books. I really only knew about book illustration. I was taught by Tony Ross who was working on his own picture books while heading the illustration department and he used his contacts to get me my first job - illustrating Sherlock Holmes stories for the French publisher Gallimard.

This was a dream job. Gallimard had published some of my favourite authors and Sherlock Holmes was a gift to an illustrator. But I blew it. When I took my drawings in, I was told that they were 'too dark'. Whether they were literally too dark (I was fond of big areas of black ink) or whether they were too grim, I never did find out. My career as a book illustrator stalled there and never really took off again.

Instead I became an editorial illustrator, working for newspapers and magazines, though I did do the odd advert or brochure or even label for cans of beans. Deadlines are tight in this line of work and are immovable. The rubbery deadlines of the book world are still a little strange to me.

Illustration is in part about making the best use of the restrictions that are applied. It is like being asked to cook a meal with limited time and limited ingredients. What can I do in the time allowed? How can I adapt the brief so I can play to my strengths? With editorial illustration time is possibly the biggest factor. We were never given more than a day to come up with a rough (though mostly with an Economist cover, the concept was given to you) and then do the finished artwork.

Sometimes it was a lot less than a day.

Visiting economist

We had the lovely Mardi Dungey over for dinner tonight. Mardi is on one of her visits to the university and has a punishing schedule which sees her jetting off back to Tasmania tomorrow morning.

It is always a pleasure to see Mardi. Not only is she great company, but she's also like our own personal economist. Everyone should have one.

Of course she isn't really ours.

Not to keep

Adult fiction

I spoke to Chris Riddell again today. He was inviting us up to his Norfolk retreat and as usual we ended up having a long conversation about all kinds of other stuff.

The last time we spoke I had been telling Chris that I had been contemplating doing some historical fiction and mentioned we talked about an idea I have had for a while for a book that opens with the a pretty bloody evocation of the Battle of Hastings. I started working on it for a project for Usborne that fell through. It has been buzzing about in my mind ever since. Chris was suggesting that I write the same book - but for the adult market.

I suppose I have always thought that I would write for adults. This is not because I think that writing for children is not a compelling enough thing on its own, but because there are things I would like to write that just seem to lend themselves more readily to a book for adults.

We'll see. . .

Vespa

Or should that be vespe? Having suffered a plague of flying ants recently, Cambridge is now undergoing a plague of wasps. And I hate wasps.

I still hear it regularly trotted out that wasps are fascinating creatures that won't sting you if you leave them alone. This is such nonsense. I have been stung sitting on a tube, where the first I even knew about the wasp was the sting it rammed in my neck. I was stung mowing the lawn at our house in Norfolk. A wasp dropped out of an apple tree onto my head (which was closely cropped and tonsured by time's tweezers) and stung me twice before I flicked it off.

Wasps are evil. They may rid the garden of pests and pollinate orchards. They may read stories to old people in hospitals and save baby seals from fur trappers for all I know, but they are coming between me and my peaches and they need to be stopped.

Stopped, I tell you!

Well - all right, perhaps I don't actually hate them. I find all animal life fascinating to a varying degree and wasps, like ants, do have a particular weird intensity about them. I suppose its just that whilst you can watch a bee going about its business safe in the knowledge that it is more interested in pollen than you, wasps have that drunken 'Who are you looking at?' unpredictability about them.

And then there are the numbers. When there are a couple of wasps it doesn't seem quite so bad (though even one determined wasp can spoil a picnic) but at the moment there are thousands of them. I walked into our tiny back garden the other day and heard a rasping sound I took to be something - a mouse say - gnawing away at something. But it turned out to be a dozen or so wasps rasping away at the wooden fence, gathering their materials for a bout of nest-building. I don't want to hear wasps chewing. It's wrong and bit scary.

Repetition

I am busy working through Helen Szirtes amendments to The Dead of Winter. When I wrote the book, Helen sent me a set of questions and suggestions. These were big issues about plot and character and continuity and so on. These present amendments are to that second draft that resulted from those initial editing suggestions.

We are at a the fine tuning stage now. Helen has repeatedly written 'rep' for repetition. Repetition is my most common crime and in conversations with other writers I have discovered that am not alone in this. It is incredible how many times I can use the same word in the same paragraph. It is some kind of skill.

Some kind of incredibly useless skill.