Plugging away at Chapter V

At the moment it is taking me a fortnight or more to write a whole chapter of Alice’s adventures at the Pole. I managed about five hundred words of chapter five last week, to which I added another 1000 words yesterday. It’s only just a tiny bit more than a third written so far. However, what I had written did inspire me to make two of the illustrations for the chapter. Here’s the first.

As I’ve said on previous occasions when posting my own illustrations to my own story, I don’t want to start telling the story before I’ve finished writing it. However this one is rather self-explanatory. Alice turns into a fish.

I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with here. I don’ know if you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s rather disappointing last film, “The Meaning of Life”. One of the devices for linking – or trying to link – the disparate narrative elements of the film is a group of fish in an ornamental fish tank, upon whom the Pythons’ heads have been superimposed. Bearing in mind the technological limits of film special effects in the early 80s, it’s not bad. That kind of inspired the appearance of the Alicefish in my illustration.

This is the second illustration, of a crab with a violin case holding onto Alice’s lateral fin. No explanations for this.

In what I’ve written so far of the chapter I certainly can see an opportunity for another illustration, but I’m going to need to finish the chapter in order to make a full appraisal of what I can do. Who knows, maybe I’ll make more than two more illustrations to this chapter? As long as I can keep the ball rolling towards the forty eight in total that I’m aiming for.