Turndust #4.
I’m away from my materials over the weekend and I can’t wait to get back to the project again. I’m going to finish a ‘full circuit’ of the pages in hand-drawn form before I start working with these scanned versions.
I’ve noticed several I’ll want to rework again, and most of them need to be worked on to make them join up better in the narrative as well.
I’m happy with the density of the imagery, but perhaps not so happy with its clarity. My friend Yola kindly looked over my drawings and I feel the combination of the work’s presentation in loose sheets (rather than pages), the poetic setting of the narrator (as thoughts entertained by the miller, mini-dramatisations of what could happen, and the metaphorical meanings that the book strives to serve) and English-as-a-second-language combined to make her job a bit difficult. It’s not a straightforward bit of presentation anyway. The narrative-in-character is something I’ve used elsewhere (in Tiercel and The Remembrancer), but perhaps the narrative drive was clearer there. I feel that this problem remains obscure, and is likely to continue that way up to the maquette stage. Possible remedies include: editing the text to make the ‘miller’s thoughts’ clearly just that:thoughts. I could do this by having an authorial voice preface the character’s ‘I’. But this is not something I much want, having shaped things this far without it.
I could also abandon the handwriting. Printed text might exercise a more intentional power. But I don’t really want to sacrifice the commonality of mark, nor the sense of organism that the handwriting conjures.
At any rate I will proceed for now to take the book through this hand-drawn phase. I will consider this problem when I get to the digital phase.