Sketching (or sketchy?)

I haven't typed anything on the book for a few days. I have written a lot though. I call it sketching. A very, very long time ago, I was going to leave school and train to be an illustrator/comic book artist. There are several ambitions I've held at one time or another that I've sidelined for one reason or another that I still harbour the odd dream about. The illustrator/comic book artist thing isn't one of them. It may be the only one. I do still wish I could draw better, and occasionally pull Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain out to see if I can finally crack that negative space sketching thing. I do a mean Garfield. I even carved one into a mate's guitar once (with his permission).

So when, instead of writing the actual book, I grab my notebook and write a sort of scaled version of what's going to happen (I don't know what the scale is: maybe 1:5, maybe 1:10. I dumped geography GCSE to do art - the irony), I call it sketching. It's some sort of hangover from when I was scratching out anatomy diagrams with a trusty 4b pencil. It feels right. Some people use the term outline. That seems cold to me. Something to use when planning an academic essay or a corporate presentation. Images of bullet points of varying shapes with three word breakdowns of paragraphs or smilies to denote the mood of the chapter pop into my head. So I'll stick with sketching - fast, unrefined, rough, undetailed with scratchy lines that sometimes don't look like what they're meant to, loads of words scribbled out, filling notebooks until such time as it's ready to take the water colours out and finish the job.

There are only two more chapters to sketch. After that, there are five to paint.

I'm sketching in biro at the moment. 4b's rubbish for writing.