escaping the frame: SCARY - History of Ancient Egypt Archives

June 6, 2006

Horris' SCARY History of Ancient Egypt

I HAVE BEEN FORCED OUT OF HIDING! By noting the statistics for my website, Horris has informed me that there have been more and more searches occurring lately looking to find out when Horris' SCARY History of Egypt will be released. I am terribly sorry to make you wait! The book is actually finished, and my agent is just now looking around to find the best place to publish it, as I have parted ways with Hylas, the publishing company that published my first book, SCARY: A Book of Horrible Things for Kids (Español version here.)

So watch this space for news of the release of the much-anticipated next installment of Horrible Horris' adventures. Horris and I both hope that you don't have to wait tooooooo long for the book. But we sure are happy that you are looking forward to it so much!

joaquín ramón herrera writes for children, adults, and other humans found elsewhere in the continuum of development. He is also an illustrator, musician, and surprise protagonist. If you have found his glasses, wallet, or keys, please contact him here.

(neuralpermalink established at 08:38)

April 4, 2006

Illustrating Horris' SCARY History of Ancient Egypt

I continue along this biz-ness of drawing Horris into the ancient time of the Pharaohs' rule. Even ancient-er than the days they first started calling Kings "Pharaohs." (That little slice of nomenclature pie was cooked up in the 18th Dynasty, if I'm not mistaken, but I'm just going from memory at this point, and it's been a long time since then :)

I won't show you 99% of the illustrations here, because I don't want to spoil it for all the lovely dollar-spending people who feed me while I draw. After all, you (and I assume you are one of these magnificent patrons) spend your money on my work, and that is directly responsible for my having time to make it at all. So thank you! And I hope you get a huge kick out of Horris' latest exploits in December of 2006, when I believe it is that Horris' first triple-set will be published, and possibly even as a boxed set. We begin with (of course), the already published and rather celebrated SCARY: A Book of Horrible Things for Kids, and in December of this year, both Horris' SCARY History of Ancient Egypt and Horris' SCARY History of Dinosaurs will be published by Hylas Publishing, just as the first Horris book was. Of course, as publishing goes, it must be understood that sometimes, certain details are not fixed for a time. And so it is that I may update that release date. Watch this blog for any BREAKING HORRIS NEWS.

(Horris insisted I capitalize that, and I am not about to get into an argument on design with him. He is rather determined when he makes up his mind on the look or feel of something. I apologize for the exclamatory nature, the rather blaring nature of his text. It's only that he gets excited about everything.)

Anyway, I thought I'd take a break between a spider, and a pig as big as a pyramid at Giza to tell you what I'm up to. I'm sorry it's been so quiet around here, but that's just sort of how it works. I write in a lot of other places, and aside from that, I am usually drawing or getting my hands into something. I only keep so busy because if I stop, I'll start banging on tables and snapping and drumming with my fingers and people will get really angry and tell me I'm making them nervous and to leave the room.

zoom,

March 22, 2006

Done with Manuscript's First Edit

My edit, that is. My editor will give it back at some point, and I will make a second pass through. But MAN does it feel good to finish with that! That first edit through is always so reassuring. So much gets cleaned up. Granted, it will tighten up even more. But just the mess that gets smoothed out on that first pass...it always soothes my soul.

I have to put the backmatter together (acknowledgments, biblio, etc), and then I'm on to the art! I love to get lost in making the art. I really look forward to letting Horris run free in Egypt. The art and statuary of Ancient Egypt is really amazing. I feel honored to be rendering any work that in any way references it. Word. And I've been immersed in it for a while, since I started researching this book. I've gathered a ton of photos, and it will be fun to play with the look.

Meanwhile, I've been writing a bit in other places, places I won't link to right here. I don't want you to read too much and accidentally be recruited. Carry on with your carefree gardening, Emil! The army is large enough right now, and by dawn we have to pour our magical battalions down the Five Peaks like sunshine become fire. Send letters. They're always appreciated....

March 11, 2006

Done with first pass of Egypt

Done! And I can't say much more than that. Wow. The tough part is over. Now a few bounces back and forth with my editor, and the text is solid. I'm quite psyched about having two days off, now. Maybe I'll even take three. But I should hunt through my notes and such, see if I have the date that the art is due. I"m going to be locked down again, 15 hours a day or so, 7 days a week for however it takes me to finish the art. 'Cause that's how I like to work, I'm not complaining. But that's how it will be, so I should look up once to note how much distance to the shore, and then put my head down and work it. I really, really look forward to doing the art. After writing, it's like shakin' it all out, shakin' your fingers, legs, arms out. Drawing—-after so much intense reading/writing-—is like swimming around the pool, after you've been building a ten foot replica of the Temple of Karnak out of toothpicks. Yeah. Something like that.

Dinnertime. Tomorrow I'll do an edit. Tighten it up. Monday, I'll give it to Gail.

March 7, 2006

One More Week? [writing Egypt]

Horris art by JRH I thought I should drop in here and let you know I am not dead. No, not dead at all. Just working like a madman. I am hoping that this extension I asked my editor for was the last one I'll need. I think it is. It will still be tight, but it is, at least, possible to finish within a week's time. I have most of the book done by now. Reaching the home stretch. But then, I must go through again and do a second pass before I give it to my editor.

Horris art by JRH Lately, I've been thinking more and more about the first novel in the (fiction) Horris series, Horris, Little Eli, and the Secret Vision. The trek through writing those 300 pages was certainly a deep and involved one. I'm beginning to feel my mind want to move in the direction of beginning the second draft. I have a lot of ideas for making it tighter, making it work better. Ideas begin working on you. They have their own schedule, and definition of "attention."

Major flaws have been identified, and I feel I know just what to do in numerous instances to improve each and every one. I look forward to beginning that. But don't get me wrong. I have a lot of art to do for Horris' SCARY History of Egypt first. And then I'd like to not do any book stuff for a day or three. I hope, at that point, I will have my manuscript back from my editor so I can lunge into the second official pass of the novel.

Now, to update another blog or two, and then to get back on the book. It's still pretty early.

February 19, 2006

Akhenaton, Tut, and Amarna - [writing egypt]

There are no weekends anymore for yours truly, and I am awake at 04:00 or 05:00 and working. I am not complaining, not a bit. When you love what you do, then why wouldn't you spend most waking moments upon it? In fact, that's one of the few things I've always been excellent at: pouring lots and lots of time and energy into those things I loved to do. Additionally, if I get tired and need to take a nap at two pm or whatnot, I do so. And if I need to talk a walk to let the wind sort out my thoughts, I do so.

I worked about 12 or 13 hours yesterday, and I got a lot done. Some days I do mostly reading. I'll think I'm set to write another chapter/section, and I'll bump into a fact I want (need) to know more about. So I'll open one or more of the 14 books I have open and spread around me, or I'll start checking my notes. Sometimes that fact-searching will lead to hours of reading and cross-checking books and notes! And with Ancient Egypt you have to be prepared for the constant flow of uncertainty that comes from the fact that the Egyptians weren't particularly concerned with History, or leaving texts anyone could learn from! They were primarily concerned with staving off the dark uncertainty of the Void; of the West side of the Nile, where the Dead lived and watched the sunlit homes of the living every night, from their tombs. The art and text we have from them is, for the most part, inscriptions and scrolls to guard against what might go wrong in the Spirit world, or on the way! So there is so much—even common matters for them—of which they have left no trace. And sometimes I wonder if they would even appear as magical and mythical and mighty as they do without that constant mystery that dogs so much of the records they have left behind.

But I imagine they would. They were just grand people. Grand in vision, grand in fear, grand in self-satisfaction, and imagination. Grand in their ambition, and grand in their power grabs. I know, now, that I will have to travel, one day, to the Great Pyramid at Giza; to the Sphinx, to the Nile, and her black delta. I am wholly entranced and have become quite emotional about my study. I have been bit by the bug that I imagine Egyptologists suffer. In love with a dead and mystical race who lived thousands of years ago; an urge to run to them and lose myself in the black, gritty tomb tunnels, to run my hands over carvings men made so long ago, to see with my own eyes their Book of the Dead, and to breathe into my own nostrils their musty, dusty essence, to become one with their time and race and glory and power. It's all rather enchanting, and I wonder if anyone could read as much as I have so far and not feel the way I do. I suppose so. Sad.

Mostly I have been taken, as of late, with Akhenaton (néé Amenhotep IV and also spelled Akhenaten, Akhnaton, etc) and his dramatic and deliberate decision to upset everything with his distilled vision of "Ma'at" and what became called the "Amarna period." He is called "the first individual" by some Egyptologists, and is looked upon as a visionary for his aesthetic of Truth that he preached to his disciples, that the sculptors took into their eye and hands as they made some of the most evocative (and "ugly") work seen in all of the Egyptians' collection that survives. He was, perhaps, the first to propose a monotheistic God, and changed names, moved everyone out of Thebes (Amun's city), and abandoned all the old gods of Egypt. Because of all this, he was (is?) also vilified, cursed, and hated by many. He is called heretic, pervert, and worse; his name was scratched out and his cause abandoned. His stepson (you may have heard of him, and probably as "Tutankhamun" instead of the name "Tutankhaton," as he was known for much of his life) moved the city and all his people back to Thebes, and reinstated the old gods.

You can begin to see why Akhenaton is such a controversial figure. The aesthetic of Amarna broke away from the rigid, stylized Egyptian art we know so well, and those pieces are now known, in turns, as ugly, and beautiful. Myself, I find them beautiful, and not only for their fluid arcs and long, distorted, proportion, but for the ideal that drove Akhenaton's philosophies. Truth, candor, real expression.

And I love the duality/ambiguity that surrounds Akhenaton's character (and incidentally, much of Egyptian thought and symbolism). Just as I loved the duality that composes Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant when I read it in my teen years, and was riveted by Q. Tarantino's penchant for portraying the anti-hero's point of view in so many of his films. For I feel that this mixture is a certainty and bedrock reality of life and of character, one far more known to the Eastern world. I have never been at peace with the intense polarization of Western Thought, the whole Black vs. White, Good Must Destroy (and "Destory!") all Evil dichotomy that Alan Watts deconstructs and refutes in so much of his writing. And in studying the gods of the Ancient Egyptians (Set, for one, who represented war, confusion, invasion, and disorder; who was a foe of Horus——a revered and wholly "good" god——yet who was prayed to by the armies and troops to help them win battles) shows us that they understood that nothing was so clearly delineated.

I feel a deep admiration for what I know of Akhenaton, who dared so much, who loved his six daughters famously, and yet, never had a male heir to pass down his vision to. Thus, his vision died. Nobody understood it, and in his wake, they condemned Amarna, and Akhenaton, and Tutankhaton became Tutankhamun, and back to Thebes everyone went, cursing Akhenaton at every step. Back to the traditional, back to the rigid, back to the predictable.

Do you not feel the deep sorrow that history can etch into a heart? The words of power and clarity that can be etched away by wind, sand, or man's intent to obfuscate and forget. Horror, I feel, at the loss of truth, but in a way it is all so heartening, should be uplifting to read of these battles of the heart and mind thousands of years ago.

For do such grand energies really ever die? Do the clothes and the symbols of our gods matter? Do the battles we fight today differ so much from those fought in Ancient Egypt?

No, they do not. Evil rises again, greed hides the machinations of the few, Power intoxicates man, and he falls to his belly like a snake in a sandpit. Fear dances with the sunset to this day, and Truth still weaves among men, ever her insubordinates, who whirl blind, sniffing at the unguent and incense of her hem.

February 7, 2006

Done with Research, Now Writing Scary History of Egypt

Heavy into writing Horris' SCARY History of Egypt. Sorry no posts. But I'm zooming up on a deadline, and I've got to stay in the flow, or the many mental post-its begin to fade. Notes all over, sticky-notes, scribbled notes, open books, bookmarked sites. A lot of writing and some art, too, to hand my editor by the end of this month.

I wish I did have some time here to talk about the amazing parallels in history. I think it is very important for children to learn History early on. Of course it would helps if the books were accurate. But that's something you learn even reading the books I have been reading on Ancient Egypt. You have to read a cross-section, because each writer—each person conveying the "truth" of what happened—also offers their interpretation. Just as I am! That's what writers do. I smile when I read all the accounts of how the Ancient Egyptians valued the job of "scribe" (writer) higher than all the other professions! After all, who was it that took down this information and conveyed it to future children, women and men? It was the scribes! I wonder how their history would read, were the books not written, but fashioned by sculptors? Perhaps we would be reading about how exalted those were who spent their lives carving stone. Perhaps not. It made me smile, to read. There is a lot of truth in it, as well. I learned early on how powerful language was. Just as in Ancient Egypt, learning to write and speak and read well will aid you in any job or path you take in this life.

Time to type into a different page.

January 24, 2006

Ancient Egypt Riff 109

narrow strip of blackened silt
golden turquoise time-woven quilt
copper skin and a black-lined eye
pharaoh's house standing as the days sift by

halls of the king filled with men working in the deep
in the shadows of limestone, where the years retreat
in the great empty tunnels where the robbers later crept
haunted echoes all that's left of the promises never kept

priest and the pharaoh's gold
cat with the ring of gold
world with the soul untold
lion with the head of man
magic runes carved in the stone-hard sand
age of strong, enduring vision
of the magic in the heavens
and the power of the land

Still making notes, structuring, reading, immersing, researching. The book won't be tough to actually write. I can tell. It's all about setting up the structure that I will pour my new knowledge and stirred imagination into. The pouring will be fun and easy. The planning, mapping, gathering, cutting, fitting, preparing the "mold" is a bit less immediately gratifying, and tedious. If the energy involved in creating this book for me were a visible shape, it would definitely be lopsided on the reading/notes/researching/planning stage. What would, in the filmmaking parlance, be termed Pre-production.

And then, of course, a lot will be required in the illustrationing of the whole thing (be warned, I tend to invent words when I am so inspired or the passage requires), but that tends to draw me in so close that I end up blurring a few weeks by and hardly sleeping as I fall into drawing. So it's hard to think of it as a time period. Drawing the amount of illos that go into a 96 page book is more like falling into a tunnel for me. Everything smears by—food, sleep, day—and I just draw. Morning to night, hardly a rest. It's something I can get lost in for a very intense period of time. Drawing, painting, things like that.

Textual things—writing, editing, reading—require breaks from me. I can only go so long with words before I begin to get anxious. I love them, don't get me wrong. But they simply require a different kind of concentration.

I did not used to have the discipline for the first part of the equation mentioned above—the "preproduction" part. And in my snobby artistical mind I thought the tedium was not something an artist should weather. I thought the pure, primal, gut-spillage of inspired passion was "art," and all the rest was too thoughty for me. But I learned, in time, O, the folly of my ways. Do not skimp on the planning phase! Or you will learn the hard way. However that is usually exactly the way this writer prefers to learn. What are ya gonna do? (Pay attention.) And I did learn. In fact, that beginning part is SO important that until you discipline yourself to manage the less-exciting but crucial "secondary process" part of your art, you will be undisciplined (hmm duh that's redundant) and immature as an artist, which basically means that you will never be a Master. One day, I would love to approach that level. But if I do, it will not be by fooling myself. And so I have learned to prepare, to discipline myself in my work, to take the time to prepare the ground, so that when it is time, I may just hack away with my hoe in wild abandon. Or something less absurd sounding, in the way of metaphor. Guilt-free roto-tilling? Hmm. Neurotic Gardener.

It is fascinating, Ancient Egypt. And you know what else is? Life. Because one of the things I used to say repeatedly was that I longed to study more history. My college curricula didn't include a lot of History (a lot more of Psychology, Science, Photo/Cinematography, Art), and I've always been fascinated by it. I planned (and still might?) on taking courses in college again. Not for a degree, just to learn more History. This was something I had been planning to do for a year or two. It was in the back of my mind, wasn't ready to do it yet. But knew I would (will?).

But then this series of books came along, the opportunity to write/illustrate this series of books, and I am required to do a lot of reading (a lot) on the subjects I will write about (seems fair).

So bit by bit, I can fill in areas of my knowledge base that are lacking, and in areas I specifically wanted to do as much. Isn't that amazing? Just what I wanted. Life as Santa. Cosmic Jolly Karmic Reactor. Listen to that whistle blow.

So first, it's Egypt, ancient Egypt. Next, it will be dinosaurs. Then, perhaps outer space...or right to some other countries (China, France, etc), or maybe vice versa. But either way, it will be fun, and we can learn together! Just what Horris needs, though! to know even more about the world than he does. He's such a know-it-all, man. If his head swells up any more, I don't think he'll even fit through the door.