It's time for a quick update. As you may know, The Book is ready to find a home with a publisher. Unfortunately, one or two of the publishers I would be very happy with warn aspiring authors away by saying that they pick their own candidates and have plenty of those to choose from, thank you very much. Others say they want submissions on paper, not digital, which might be a way to reduce the number of proposals they receive. If so, good, as perhaps my proposal may then have fewer others to compete with. Anyway, I had a few samples printed on good quality paper. Here is a quick view of the sample of The Book.
Some of you may have spotted that the name on the sample reads 'Nastrarruzzo', not 'Nastrazzurro'. I had to start an official business to market The Book, (and perhaps sell prints too), and wanted to avoid possible problems with companies with similar names. That's why my firm is called the 'Nastrarruzzo Compagnie'.
 |
| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
While all this is going on, I do work on the occasional new painting. Actually, there are about four in various stages of completion, but that is usual for me. Here is a fragment of one I just completed. The animal is a hexapod arboreal species, a swobbler (it was originally a 'wobbler', but I made a typo while storing the file, and the unintended 's' made the name more interesting, so I kept it. The animal is not entirely serious...
You may be wondering what the things on its back are. Well, hexapod skins vary a lot, and part of their basic integument is a sort of hair, but hair that is flattened, and often with multiple filaments, so it can range from feather-like structures, but decidedly heavier than true feathers, to a fur-like covering. The structure lends itself well to leaf-like excrescences. As hexapods are not at all restricted to the restricted palette of Earth's mammals, there is room for weird and colourful protuberances.
The fruit is a baignac, of course. Don’t eat them if you are a human.