25.3.12

Getting radical on the format, writing "blah!" a lot and hanging with a blabbering Baroness...

Today, I'm happy because I got to write the word "blah!" a lot and bugger about with convention a little. In this picture book effort I've been playing around with the format and trying different things in order to keep things interesting. On paper, it's effective and with accompanying illustrations I reckon the end result - a printed picture book should that ever come together - would definitely work well.

What I've got is a mish-mash manuscript that features pages with no text, pages with no illustrations and a flashback sequence. It's not a straight-forward narrative typical of the medium and feels closer in spirit - as a script at least - to a comic book or filmed comedy sketch though it's definitely a picture book. Still, as I said, I reckon it works as a quirky curio and with pictures and proper production it'd be a blast to grapple in your hands and flick through.

But what is the tale? It's working title is "Back into Babble with Baroness Blahzunge" and its seed is in an idea I had about a hermit's vow of silence being broken when they answered a wrong number phonecall. I thought "ha! that'd be funny!" then imagined this person being a hermit aristocrat in a German castle. I then thought she could be a compulsive talker who stopped speaking because everyone got fed up of her never-ending blabber.  The sudden shock back into verbal communication comes as an epic epiphany that she gleefully seizes after years of repression but of course we have a tragic surprise ending. (I'm not telling and neither, unfortunately, is Baroness Blahzunge.)

It's a gloriously stupid little tale and the artistic opportunities (conjuring up a pseudo-folk-German setting and drawing a Baroness going on a wild verbal frenzy) and more atypical aspects of the formatting make it a sweet piece that I've got a kick out of scripting up. Offbeat 'quirky' tale spawning and experimenting keeps it creatively enthralling and today's lesson is: keep on trying different things and be careful if you ever go through extended spells of silence and then suddenly start speaking again.

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