sstaylor - Tumblr blog

sstaylor · 6 years ago

Text

Read Chapter One of The Expeditioners and the Lost City of Maps

Chapter One

“We’ll be arriving in Gryg City soon,” a BNDL agent called through the half-open door of the baggage compartment. “Mr. Mountmorris says you can come up to the front if you want to see our arrival.”

I made my way through the piles of suitcases and trunks, and along the narrow passageway that led to the main passenger areas of the big government airship.

The lounge in the central gondola was filled with people—black uniformed BNDL, or Bureau of Newly Discovered Lands—agents, government officials, and other trainee Explorers like myself from the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences. We were all on our way to Grygia, and we crowded around the floor-to-ceiling windows of the gondola to watch the jagged peaks of the Carpathian Mountains rise up below us.

The airship was moving fast and for a terrible moment I thought we were going to hit the snow-capped mountains in front of us. But just when it looked like all hope was lost, we soared up and over them and then we were looking down at the wide white and dark green bowl of the Grygian Valley, the huge Grygian fir trees poking out of the heavy snow cover. It was early January, deep winter in Eastern Europe.

Grygia had been the first of the New Lands to be discovered, and its discovery had kicked off the New Modern Age of Exploration. Unlike us, Harrison Arnoz had made his way up and over these mountains in the early spring. He’d found a greener, more alive valley, filled with unknown species of ancient, towering trees, and the Grygian Tree Dwellers living in their intricately-constructed treehouses, complex networks of bridges connecting them to other trees and Tree Dweller communities.

But I knew that I was seeing what he had seen—from a different vantage point—and it was thrilling.

As we descended, the streets and buildings of Gryg City came into focus. The slopes of the mountains directly surrounding the city were covered with Grygian fir trees, but not far outside, huge swaths of the mountainside had been completely cleared. I could see big machines moving around in the logging camps. And at the other end of the valley, I could see the huge holes that had been dug into the hillside for the Gryluminum mines. The Gryluminum pits and strips of treeless ground looked like wounds and scars on the surface of the mountains.

“Hey! Baggage boy, you’d better get back to your work. We’re almost there.”

I looked up into the jeering face of my Academy classmate Lazlo Nackley, standing by the windows with his friend Jack Foster and another classmate, Kemal Asker.

“Come on, Lazlo, leave him alone,” Kemal said, giving me an apologetic shrug. I liked Kemal and I knew he hated the way Lazlo had been treating me.

“What? It’s true. Mr. Mountmorris is going to need his bags. And you’re his baggage boy.” Lazlo laughed.

My brother Zander and our friend Sukey Neville came running into the gondola, Zander’s trained parrot Amerigo Vespucci on his shoulder. Sukey was wearing her uniform as a member of the trainee flying corps, an olive green flight suit, tall brown leather boots, and a brown jacket with a bright red “ADR Flying Squad Trainee” patch on it. Her copper-colored curls were pinned up on top of her head, but a few had escaped around her face. Sukey was a Neo, or Neotechnologist, but without her bright clothes made from synthetic materials, she looked just like all the other trainee pilots.

Except for the tiny green lights embedded in her ear. They blinked at me a few times before resuming a steady glow.

Zander was wearing his black ADR Officers Training Corps uniform, just like Jack and Lazlo. “Hey, Kit. They let us watch from the cockpit,” Sukey said. “It’s amazing. I thought we were going to hit the mountains, but we didn’t. Oh, look! There’s the aerodrome.”

We were descending now, very slowly. Below, I could see the wide landing platform of an aerodrome. Smaller airships bobbed on their platforms. Suddenly, there was a loud rushing sound and a glider raced along the ground below us and rose up into the sky with a roar.

“It’s a flying machine,” someone shouted. “One of the new gasoline engine ones!”

We all watched as it flew up dangerously close to the gondola’s window and then disappeared up into the sky.

“Whoosshhhhh,” Pucci chortled, mimicking the sound of the flying machine.

“It must be a test flight from the ADR base outside Gryg City,” Sukey said. The Agency for the Defense of the Realm was building military bases all up and down the border with the Indorustan Empire, and now that we were at war with the Indorustans they were moving soldiers and pilots to all of them.

I turned around and met Sukey’s eyes. She was on her way to finish her training at the base. It would be her in the flying machine in a few weeks or months.

“Where’s M.K.?” I asked them. My little sister had spent most of the voyage down in the control room. I missed her. Sukey shrugged. Zander said he hadn’t seen her.

“See you later,” I told them. “The baggage needs me.”

I headed back to the baggage compartment. I had to repack Mr. Mountmorris’s bags before we landed and then carry them off the airship myself. He didn’t allow anyone else to touch them, which would have been flattering except that I hated him and I found it a little humiliating to have to organize his underwear.

Another black-suited, scowling BNDL agent was stationed outside the door to the baggage compartment and he eyed me up and down as I approached and said, “Mr. Mountmorris wants to see you. He’s in his berth.”

“But I thought I was supposed to get his bags together. We’re about to dock.”

“That was the order. You’d better hurry.”

Mr. Mountmorris was in the fanciest of the passenger berths. I had spent the voyage sleeping in a cramped box-like berth next to the baggage compartment, on the bottom bunk, beneath an engineer who snored and talked in his sleep about someone named Carla.

When I entered, Mr. Mountmorris’s assistant, Jec Banton, nodded at me. Mr. Mountmorris was sitting at a table pulled up to the window so he could see the view. The table was laid with a teapot, cups, and a plate of cupcakes and pastries decorated with bright green frosting.

“Hello, Mr. West,” he said, without turning around. “We are almost there. Exciting, isn’t it? Your first trip to Gryg City.”

His thin hand hovered over the cupcakes. Finally he chose one, plucking it off the plate as though it were a flower in a garden. I watched him lick the frosting from the top before putting it down.

“It would be if I knew what I was doing here.” I paused. “Sir.”

He turned quickly and fixed his eyes on me. He must have had lots of different pairs of colored lenses to go in his eyes. When I’d first met him, they’d been green. Today they were a deep shade of violet.

“You want to know what you’re doing here, do you?”

“It would be really nice,” I told him. “I’ve been in top secret clandestine services training for the past six months. I’ve learned how to survive in the desert, to trail someone for ten hours without being caught. I’ve learned how to make a weapon out of a dinner fork and to make basic conversation in thirteen languages. I know how to find a meal in the rainforest and I can find a perfect hiding spot within twenty seconds of walking into almost any room. And now, I am on my way to Grygia as your ‘baggage assistant,’ which seems to involve a lot of organizing of your socks. Yes, I would like to know what I‘m doing here.” I’d been holding in my anger for a long time and it poured out of me now. It was hot in the berth and sweat trickled down my right temple.

Mr. Mountmorris smiled and waved a hand toward the window, and Gryg City beyond. “You are here to carry out a top secret mission in accordance with your training,” he told me.

“Oh, right,” I said sarcastically. “Yes, the top secret handling of the baggage. Will my mission involve socks or underwear today, Mr. Mountmorris?”

Jec Banton raised his eyebrows in disapproval, but Mr. Mountmorris just smiled and chose another cupcake.

“Mr. West, do you know how much your training over the last six months has cost the Bureau of Newly Discovered Lands? No? Well, let me tell you. More than one thousand Allied Dollars per day. As you say, you have had courses in world languages, in self-defense, in code-breaking and cartography. You know how to find water in a barren desert and you know how to disappear in any city in the world.”

He waited a moment, then asked me, “Do you think that we would spend that much money on you if we meant to have you manage baggage for the entire trip?”

I gulped. “No, I guess not.”

“Do you think that maybe, just maybe, we need to be careful about how we insert you into Simeria? Because there are many people who are interested in what our intentions are there and the moment you step off this airship you will surely be followed by clandestine agents of the Indorustan Empire?”

“I suppose that yes, that would make sense.” I kept my eyes on the green cupcake in his hand.

“And do you think that perhaps this mission is all part of your cover? You do remember the lessons on creating a cover, an acceptable public identity that allows you to achieve your clandestine aim, do you not?”

“Oh, this is all my . . . ? Oh,” I gulped. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Now, Mr. West, I was just about to tell you that when we have arrived in Gryg City and I have had the afternoon to settle in at the Royal Grygian Hotel, I would like you to come and see me in my suite and I will brief you on your mission.”

“O–o–okay,” I stammered.

“And remember what I said about you being followed. For the moment, you must make no effort to go undetected. In fact, it would be good if you were seen walking around Gryg City. You are a trainee Explorer, coming along on my diplomatic mission as my baggage handler. You may act as though you are exactly that.”

At that moment, the airship bumped gently against the landing platform. I heard a loud whoosh as the burners slowed. Through the windows, I could see workers scurrying around on the platform, securing the airship with ropes.

“Oh look,” Mr. Mountmorris exclaimed cheerfully, his face now as bright and joyful as a kid’s on Christmas morning. “We’re here!”

#Expeditioners ExpeditionersLostCityofMaps SSTaylor

3 notes · View notes

sstaylor · 6 years ago

Photo

Coming September 17th! Thanks for your patience, Expeditioners. At long last, I am pleased to announce the publication of the third Expeditioners adventure, The Expeditioners and the Lost City of Maps. In the meantime, I’m happy to announce that The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair is now available in paperback. You can purchase it at your favorite independent bookstore or online! #TheExpeditioners #SSTaylor #Steampunk #TheLostCityofMaps

3 notes · View notes

sstaylor · 11 years ago

Text

"Behind the Scene" with S. S. Taylor and Katherine Roy

Part 3

Katherine Roy and I thought it would be fun to do a three-part blog post together, to discuss the writing and drawing process behind three scenes from The Expeditioners series. Today is Part 3 in the conversation. Follow these links for parts 1 and 2.

KATHERINE AND SARAH: Welcome back, readers! For our final “behind the scene”, we thought we’d discuss one from the second Expeditioners adventure, The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair. It takes place aboard a giant steamship called The Deloian Princess. Let’s jump right in!

SARAH: Kit, Zander, M.K. and other members of their expedition team are heading south towards the Caribbean. While Zander and M.K. are enjoying the ship’s amenities, Kit would rather play an exotic game called Simalio or eavesdrop on the conversations of their fellow passengers.

I loved sitting on the main deck and watching the assortment of people making their way around the ship. There were BNDL and ADR and ANDLC officials on their way to the Caribbean from New York, wearing concerned expressions while exchanging hushed remarks with each other about Simeria. There were glamorous Neo couple from Paris or Milan, wearing colorful clothes made from synthetic silks and velvets and carrying small dogs, their fur dyed red or purple or green.

SARAH: As they steam south for their expedition, the kids are finally introduced to the big world. Despite their adventures—and their father’s far ranging travels—they’ve actually lived a fairly sheltered life and this is the first time they’ve seen people from all over the Allied World, heard different languages, seen vastly different customs. This is one of those scenes that I knew would be in the book before I even started writing. I love the romance of an ocean voyage and I was thinking of the way in which the great steam liners acted as opportunities for the mixing of people from different places and walks of life during the heyday of the British Empire.

KATHERINE: When I first read this section of the manuscript I knew it had to be an illustration, too. I was terribly intimidated—so much informationneeded to go in this scene!—but I also knew it would be fun to visually showcase the broader world that Kit, M.K., and Zander are finally encountering for the first time. I started working on this page by first doing a little visual research on steam liners from the 1900’s, paying attention to details of the decks, the body language of the passengers, the number of people using the decks. I also looked at clothing, costumes, and accessories that the passengers might wear to find details that would give the scene more atmosphere. I love learning about fashion in different countries and eras—clothing tells you the story of a culture’s history, aesthetics, trade agreements, climate, and designated gender roles—and poking around online gave me some initial ideas to build into the first sketches of the other characters.

KATHERINE: The next stage involved doing a lot of separate drawings of figures before putting them together into a cohesive whole. A lot of questions have to be asked when designing a spread, because time passes in the scene as a readers’ eye travels through the scene. There were a lot of moments that needed to happen in this one drawing—Kit is pretending to read a newspaper, Zander and Kemal and Joyce have just come from the pool, Monty Brioux is about to approach their ship, there’s a game going on below decks—so there’s really a lot to look at, and a lot happening at once. What should go on the left side of the drawing? What should go on the right? How should I deal with composing the image around the seam—called the gutter—that would fold my “shot” in half in the final book? I began by drawing each major character or group of characters separately, then scanning them into Photoshop from my sketchbook. That way I could move each figure around on the page until it felt right.

SARAH: As I writing,I was very conscious of wanting the ship to represent Kit’s isolation. He is missing Sukey desperately, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s trapped in the middle of the ocean, along with the rest of the passengers . . . and some pirates. Monty Brioux is a notorious pirate whose crew has been taking cargo ships from the government.

On our ninth day at sea we were steaming due east when a Neo woman on deck shouted that pirates were just off our starboard side. A couple hundred yards to the east, we could see the bright-purple solar sails of the biggest boat we’d seen yet.

“It’s Monty Brioux!” someone called out.

KATHERINE: As the drawing began to come together, I started to see little character moments and opportunities for play, including how I could use small clues to hint at upcoming moments like the pirate encounter. Illustrators love to drop in personal touches, and this illustration includes cameos of two of the dogs in my life. The first is of Jellybean, my brother’s girlfriend’s deer-legged Chihuahua, a perfect model for one of the small dogs belonging to the “glamorous Neo couples from Paris or Milan, wearing colorful cloths made from synthetic silks and velvets…” And the second is of Askim, our neighbor’s dog, who sometimes keeps me company in my studio while I work. I dressed Askim in an expeditioner-style backpack and drew him as the only one to notice Monty’s approaching ship, which hasn’t quite happened yet in the real time of the moment(s) I chose to illustrate for this scene.

SARAH: In addition to serving as an introduction to the larger world, the ship also serves as the setting for a dangerous confrontation between Kit and Lazlo’s Nackley’s father Leo. Kit has already had a tense confrontation with Lazlo Nackley, but now the young explorer’s father has reason to believe that Kit is hiding something from him. Again, Kit needs to be very careful. In many ways, Leo Nackley holds Kit’s future in his hands.

Leo Nackley grabbed my arm, squeezing it until I gasped with pain, and turned me around until I was looking up at him.

“You sarcastic little snot,” he growled. “You know something that you’re not telling us. I can feel it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Nackley.” He squeezed harder. I could feel his fingers digging into my elbow.

Joyce and Zander stepped forward, but then they hesitated, waiting to see what he’d do next.

KATHERINE: Though this confrontation isn’t explicitly pictured in the illustration, the tension between Kit and the Nackleys was very much on my mind when I drew it. I wanted Kit’s body language to be tense, mistrusting, ever-watchful of the people and agents around him and on the look out for Leo Nackley’s next move. As always, my husband posed for me based on my sketches to help me get the gesture and mood right. Here he is as Kit eyeing some businessmen on the deck of the Princess, and as M.K. working on a new piece of machinery.

SARAH: When I first saw Katherine’s illustration, I was thrilled because I thought she’d gotten the feel of this scene exactly right. It’s like a party out there on the sea, but then there in the background is the pirate ship. There’s danger waiting and before long they’re going to come face to face with it.

KATHERINE: It was such a fun scene to riff on thanks to the richness and detail of the world-building in the text. An illustration doesn’t have to exactly follow a manuscript, so long as it’s true to the description and accurate to the characters. In the context of the story I’m really proud of how the words and the final drawing of the scene pair so well together!

SARAH: So am I! It’s always so much fun to see the visual details of my imagined world in Katherine’s illustrations. Thanks, Katherine! And thanks to you, dear reader, for reading!

KATHERINE: Yes, thank you so much for joining our conversation! Next year we’re sure to do more of these joint blog posts as Book Three moves forward. Sarah, can you give us any hints about what happens next in the series? SARAH: Well, Kit will learn more about Grygia and the beginnings of the New Modern Age of Exploration, and as the war heats up, he and his siblings and friends will find themselves carrying out some important missions in the hot and dangerous deserts of Simeria.

KATHERINE: Sounds amazing! Well it’s mid-December and the holidays are just around the corner, but there's still enough time to get copies of The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair as gifts. Please check with your local bookstore or order them online through Amazon.com. Happy holidays from the Expeditioners! See you at the shelf!

10 notes · View notes

sstaylor · 11 years ago

Text

"Behind the Scene" with S. S. Taylor and Katherine Roy

Part 2

Katherine Roy and I thought it would be fun to do a three-part blog post together, to discuss the writing and drawing process behind three scenes from The Expeditioners series. Today is Part 2 in the conversation. To read Part 1, please follow this link.

SARAH: Okay, let’s jump right into our next scene, this time from Book Two, The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair…

It was warm and festive inside the Longhouse for the dinner kicking off the Final Exam Expedition season; we’d each be proposing our own expeditions, and the ten best proposals would be announced in six weeks at the Announcement Banquet. The room was full of energy and anticipation.

The long tables were filled with parents and special visitors, all of us watched by the stuffed heads of lions and Elebeests, Shadow Leopards and other exotic creatures, the huge Doolandan Elk antler chandeliers casting flickering candlelight on our conversations.

SARAH: As soon as I decided that Kit, Zander and M.K. would join their friend Sukey at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences in the second Expeditioners adventure, The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair, I started thinking about what the Academy would look like and about the spaces where students would spend their time. I knew that the Longhouse was a great place to show the dynamics between the Wests and other students and teachers and also between the siblings themselves. The dining hall at a boarding school is full of possibility because it brings everybody in that community together in a common place.

KATHERINE: The Academy campus sounded endlessly cool; there were just so many terrific spaces and buildings to draw! I wanted as many exterior and interior drawings of the school as possible to appear in the final book. I remember first reading Sarah’s description of the Longhouse and loving all the shiny details she described in the text. Shadow Leopards? Chandeliers? What does a Doolandan Elk look like? I made notes to myself about these and other questions and answers that would impact the illustration, too. What time of year is it? Who’s in the room? Is there a way to show the outside of the Longhouse? There were so many important points to consider. How would I strike the right tone and content in the final illustration? I remember calling Sarah and discussing both the atmosphere of the room and the tension in the scene.

SARAH: The narrative “point” of this scene is the confrontation between Kit and Lazlo Nackley, another young explorer who has a history of denigrating Kit and thwarting him.

The backdrop to the confrontation is the noisy, bustling Longhouse. The Academy’s headmaster, Hilda Magnusdottir, is just about to announce the kick-off to the new Final Exam Expedition season when Lazlo approaches the table where Kit, his siblings, and their friend Sukey Neville are eating.

“What’s the matter, Neville?” We all looked up to see Lazlo Nackley standing over our table, holding his empty dinner tray. “The food isn’t rich enough for you? They say real Explorers can eat anything. I once ate a cockroach when I was exploring in Deloia.”

“Don’t they also say, ‘You are what you eat?’” I muttered. Everyone at the table laughed, and Lazlo flushed red.

“Excuse me?” He fixed his pale blue eyes on me.

“Come on,” Sukey said. “Leave us alone, Lazlo. Or are you still mad you lost to them in the challenge?”

KATHERINE: At first, there seemed to be three different possible drawing approaches to this illustration. One would be just to show the room—elegant, grand, a little bit rustic—and fill it with all of those wonderful animals in the text. Another approach would be to focus on the presenters during the announcement ceremony, especially Hilda Magnusdottier, perhaps with Mr. Mountmorris in the background. And a third approach might be just to focus on the kids and the encounter between Kit and Lazlo. After careful consideration, I decided that all of them could probably be combined into one illustration, and that the composition could stay “centered” on the encounter between Lazlo and Kit, since it was the emotional heart of the scene.

SARAH: There’s a lot of history between the Wests and Lazlo Nackley and it all comes to a head in this scene. Lazlo has a nagging sense that they put something over on him in Arizona and deep down, Kit is angry that Lazlo got so much credit and there’s nothing he can do about it. When Lazlo ribs Sukey, Kit can’t help himself. The stakes are very high and Kit’s lack of self control may have serious consequences. If Kit, Zander, M.K. and Sukey don’t get sent on this expedition, they won’t be able to try to find the location of the new map their father left for them.

KATHERINE: So for the illustration, we have Lazlo facing off with Kit. Sukey, Zander, and M.K. are present, and the food being served is generally disgusting. I asked myself a few more questions to figure out the composition of the drawing. Where does Lazlo belong in the frame, on the left side or on the right? Is Sukey watching them or still flirting with Zander when Lazlo begins to bother Kit? What’s M.K. up to while everyone else is talking? She doesn’t have much to say here; maybe she’s trying to avoid eating all that nasty soup? I did some sketches to try out poses, then took the one that worked best and dropped it into a much more zoomed out view of the room.

KATHERINE: Next came the photo reference—lodge interiors like the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, chandeliers, animal trophies, and a huge mammoth head. I also needed images of ceremonies with podiums, and of people sitting and standing in restaurants. Finally, I needed reference for all those long tables in correct perspective. Google 3D warehouse was a huge help with this to get the angles and the diminishing sizes right on all those rows of heads and chairs.

KATHERINE: In the end, the final illustration was my best attempt to include all the important parts of the scene, with the atmosphere, the characters, the actions, and the emotions all rolled into one. I also included a little joke in the art showing M.K. dumping out her disgusting soup. It seemed like something that M.K. would do, and when I checked in with Sarah she approved the addition. It’s the kind of small character moments that illustrators love to create, something that the text doesn’t originally describe but that can be visually “written” in to compliment the other actions in the scene.

SARAH: I love Katherine's illustration of this scene. You can practically smell the woodsmoke and the terrible food! Thanks for staying in this conversation with us! We’ll be back next Tuesday, December 16th, for the last installment of this behind-the-scene discussion.

KATHERINE: In the meantime if you want to buy copies of The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton’s Lair to give as Christmas gifts, be sure to head to your local bookstore soon or get them online. Thanks, readers!

SARAH: And make sure to check out Katherine’s new book, Neighborhood Sharks. It’s a great gift for kids who love science and the natural world!

1 note · View note

sstaylor · 11 years ago

Text

"Behind the scene" with S. S. Taylor and Katherine Roy

Part 1

Over the next three weeks, Katherine Roy and I will be doing a three-part blog post together. We’ll discuss the writing and drawing process behind three different scenes and drawings in The Expeditioners series. In addition to illustrating The Expeditioners, Katherine is the author/illustrator of Neighborhood Sharks and the forthcoming How to be an Elephant. Today is Part 1 in our conversation. Parts 2 and 3 will appear on December 9th and December 16th. Here we go!

SARAH.: One of the really fun things about sending The Expeditioners series out into the world has been seeing it go out with Katherine Roy’s amazing illustrations inside and her beautiful cover art on the front. It’s a strange thing for an author, seeing someone else’s idea of how your characters look when you’ve been carrying your own images of them around for so long. But I love Katherine’s work and I’ve loved seeing her illustrations of moments in my stories.

KATHERINE: And what a dream for an illustrator to get to help build the visual world of a new middle-grade novel adventure series, especially by working so collaboratively with the author! From the first scene of the first Expeditioners book I was hooked on the world that Sarah had created, full of danger and fantastic details, and saw in my mind so many possibilities for the images I could make.

SARAH: We thought it would be fun to take you “behind-the-scenes” of the process of writing and illustrating three important moments in the Expeditioners series. Let’s get started!

Amerigo Vespucci and I had gone out to try to find some flour when the Explorer with the clockwork hand caught up to me in an alley behind the market stalls.

SARAH: This is the way The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon begins. Kit West, the narrator, is thirteen at this moment in the story. He lives in a world where it’s been discovered that the maps of the world are all wrong and that there are new places to discover and explore. He and his brother and sister are trying to survive on their own after their father, a famous Explorer, disappears while on an expedition. As Kit cuts through an alleyway on his way home from the market, he’s attacked by a mysterious man.

I was halfway down the alley when the man caught up to me. I sensed him before I heard him running behind me, but there wasn’t anything I could do. . . .

“Quiet,’”the man growled . . .

“I don’t have any money, but you can have the copper in my coat pocket,” I whispered, trying to show him I wasn’t going to scream. We were all alone in the alley. No one would hear me over the noise of the market. There wasn’t any point.

“No,” he said, “I don’t need copper. Turn around. Slowly now.”

SARAH: Kit knows that the mysterious man is an Explorer of the Realm—one of the glamorous class of explorers who go out to find new lands and resources—from his clothing. The man gives him a package. The book in the package will lead Kit to a mysterious half-a-map that seems to be from his father.

He was offering it to me. My hands were shaking but I managed to take it from him. It was heavy, about the weight and shape of a printed book.

‘What’s your name?” he asked.

“Christopher,” I whispered. “Christopher West.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Your dad was right. You don’t look much like him.”

SARAH: It took me a long time to realize that this was the scene that needed to open the book. I had experimented with lots of different ways of getting the half-a-map into Kit’s hands. In one version, the siblings happened to come across it in their father’s office, in another draft, they received it in the mail.

But as soon as I came up with the character of the Explorer with the Clockwork Hand, I knew this was it. He added mystery and tension to the narrative. Who was he? Had he known Alexander West? He raised more questions than he answered and I liked the way that affected my story. His reference to Kit’s father introduces, right off the bat, one of the central questions of the series – is there any chance that Alexander West is still alive?

I also used him to introduce the world in which the story takes place. The Explorer wears a leather jacket studded with gadgets and utilities; he signals to the reader that we’re in a different place, even before I provide background on this world where the computers have all crashed and people have gone back to older technologies – steam and clockwork.

KATHERINE:The explorer with the clockwork hand was such an amazing character to open with that it was immediately obvious that he should be in the first illustration in the book. To come up with his look, I highlighted the character details in my copy of the manuscript—his gear, his leather clothing, his hat, his unshaven face, etc.—and then began making pencil sketches on blank copy paper to try out different options. I also used Google’s image search as a reference jumping off point for specific “explorer” and steampunk details, and for examples of mechanical hands. I kept sketching and drawing until the images started to feel “right” and captured the mood and tone of the scene that Sarah had written.

SARAH: I wanted the encounter to be a little bit scary, and I wanted Kit and the reader to believe that the man might actually do him harm. This was an important detail because Kit and his siblings really do have to look out for some of the adults in this world.

A gadget on the Explorer’s jacket starts beeping and he disappears as quickly as he appeared. We don’t yet know what he’s given Kit, but we know that someone is after him and that he has taken a great personal risk to give Kit the package. I wanted that sense of danger to come through, so the reader will intuit how huge, how important this map must be for the Explorer to risk so much in giving it to Kit.

KATHERINE: After coming up with the look of the explorer with the clockwork, I need to decide how to pose him to convey that sense danger and risk for both him and for Kit in their brief encounter. Do I show the clockwork man from behind? Do I show him from the front? Is he standing on the left side of the composition, or on the right? I asked my husband Tim, who now has a default second career as a reference actor for my illustrations, to pose in a couple difference positions to help me think through the composition and stage direction of the drawing. Though the explorer is definitely more mysterious when turned away from the “camera,” or the reader, this pose was a little too creepy, too predatory for my taste. In the end I decided to compose the drawing with the explorer facing forward.

KATHERINE: I also thought about point of view when working on the image. Should we the readers be looking at the explorer as if we are Kit, in a first person point of view? Or should I include Kit in the scene, which would make it a third person point of view? My illustrations have the freedom to move in and out of first and third person voice—sometimes we are watching Kit, and sometimes we are looking at an object or a person as if we are him—and I think this freedom is a nice compliment to the first person narration of Sarah’s text, as it adds another dimension to the storytelling. In this case, for the very first illustration in the book, I thought it would be important to visually show both Kit and the explorer, because both characters needed to be visually introduced. In my final digital rough draft I put the explorer with the clockwork hand on the left and Kit on the right, so that the explorer could give the package to Kit in the direction of left-to-right. In the U.S. we read from left to right, so actions in still images like illustrations or comics usually happen in the same direction, with the action ending on the right side of the page. Then I added in a few other details—Pucci the parrot sitting in the upper right hand corner, watching the scene, and the market in the background—and then made the final drawing in pencil and ink wash.

SARAH: The Explorer was one of those characters who started out as a bit player and became something much more. He’s going to be an important part of the series from here on out.

KATHERINE: Which means that I’d better get used to drawing that hand!

SARAH: Thank you for reading! We’ll be back next Tuesday, December 9th, for the next installment of this behind-the-scenes discussion!

KATHERINE: Thanks, folks! See you soon!

14 notes · View notes