A friend recently recommended ‘Steal like an artist’ by Austin Kleon to me (thank you, Medea!). While the book is not very long – only 140 pages and containing lots of drawings – it gave me a much needed kick to continue with my writing and to take up blogging again. If you’re an artist of any kind or just want to inject more creativity into your life, this book is worth a read and also contains practical suggestions of how to give your work new impulses.
One point the author makes is that you should write what you would like to read yourself. That is certainly true for any story you write, but it’s also what I would like to do with this blog. It will contain some of the curious odds and ends I stumble upon while doing research or whatever else takes my fancy and I hope you’ll find some of it of interest to yourself, too.
So here’s a picture from my ‘swipe file’, my collection of anything that inspires me or that I think worth saving for later (keeping a ‘swipe file’ is another suggestion from ‘Steal like an artist’). I found this picture by chance while looking up wave patterns, which in turn lead to white caps or so called ‘white horses’ (my current story has to do with sailing ships, so I’m reading up on weather and currents). The English photographer Richard Austin captured the Sea King’s horses jumping the Cobb in Lyme Regis during the storms last winter:
(picture is from the Daily Mail website)
