Celine Kiernan's Blog, page 12

Author Interview: Celine Kiernan

Reblogged from The Book Wars:

Celine Kiernan is a fantastic Irish author whose books have won may awards. Her biography states that she has spent a lot of time working in the film business and moving between USA, Germany and Ireland. Her Moorehawke trilogy is particularly awesome and her newest book, Into the Grey, recently won the 2013 Readers Association of Ireland Award. You may find her…

Read more… 1,836 more words

Telling the Truth to Kids: Interview at The Book Wars

I’ve been interviewed over at The Book Wars as part of their Halloween season. Started off talking about ghosts… ended up mostly talking about writing the truth for kids:

I think possibly that’s the answer to why  even in this age of cynics and disbelievers—long may they thrive—some supernatural stuff continues to prompt a reaction. If a scene reaches down inside you and grabs you in the place where your real fears and insecurities hide, if it pokes your brain in the places you’d rather leave sleeping, then it’s going to invoke a reaction in you—regardless of whether or not you believe in ghosts. What those fears may be differs greatly from person to person, of course, and so you can’t write to the audience, you have to write to your own disconcertions, and hope they  also resonate with someone else, somewhere, somehow. READ MORE HERE

Into the Grey wins 2013 RAI Best Book Award

Woot Hoot! Into the Grey has won the 2013 Readers Association of Ireland Award!

I am deeply honored and utterly delighted by this!

James & the Wreck of the Happy Shark

I’m spending a lot of time scanning and sending artwork at the moment (storyboarding for an animated short) In the process I found these scans of an old picturebook project. Thought I might as well share them! I wrote this book for my son who was obsessed with squids and whales and all things submarine at the time I never did get it off the ground – but I’m very fond of it. I wonder what happened the original art-work of these?

Ghosts: Sentient Echoes of the Hidden Past

So sorry to be late re-blogging this. I am over at Mellisa’s World as part of the Into the Grey tour, talking about ghosts and why I write ‘em:

I chose to write about ghosts today as they feature in many of my books and short stories. I used to believe in them, very much so, and come from a family where ghosts and ghostly appearances were recounted with absolute sincerity (I still believe in the sincerity of those accounts today ) Since my father’s death I’ve become more ambivalent about my belief in an afterlife and so my actual belief in ghosts has declined. This doesn’t mean I’m not open to any and all possibilities though, and certainly as a literary device they still fascinate me. (and probably always will considering my plans to write a children’s novel in which a ghost plays a major role)

So…

Ghosts: sentient echoes of the hidden past.

I have always been fascinated by the stories people keep from each other: the things we won’t tell and the histories we don’t discuss. I’m most especially fascinated by silences that are maintained (or enforced) out of the belief that forgetting is the best for everyone – as if ignorance of the past can ever help ensure a better future. These self -imposed silences exist everywhere. Mankind is always suppressing its own history– or reshaping it in the telling. On a domestic level, many people go about happy lives blissfully unaware of the family dramas that have preceded them, the memories of which have been purposefully and tacitly consigned to silent cupboards and ‘forgotten’ by those involved. READ MORE HERE

thanks to gracekiernanphotography for the ghostly photo

A Little Unexpected Animation History

Sitting here at 5am on a Sunday morning trying to get an overdue interview finished for a very patient book blogger (I’m sorry! It’s on its way!) I went onto youtube looking for a video of a lecture I did back in 2010 and I rediscovered this wee thing! Now, it probably won’t mean anything to anyone who’s not in the animation business but this is what us dinosaurs used to call a ‘line test’. It’s a video of the animator’s ‘key drawings’ (in other words the main action of an animated scene) The reason it’s so grainy is because each character (the girl, the cat, the dog) were drawn on separate sheets of paper. In order to shoot the line test you had to lay these sheets – one atop the other – over a very strong light so that the lines would all show up for the camera. This test represents the animation before it’s passed on to the assistant who (under the animator’s supervision) did the drawings that fill in the blanks.

There were three of these assistants in my day: the ‘assistant animator’, the ‘breakdown artist’, and the ‘inbetweener’. Working your way up these ranks was a great way to actually learn animation, and, in my day, it was how most people broke into the business and got their training. (Now folks seem to come straight in from college and start off in a studio as animators, which is another system entirely and just as valid)***

Anyone who is interested can find )

I’m working in animation again and I have to say it’s stunning how things have changed. I know there are some studios where this old process is still in practice, but for the most part these days the huge building of men and women it took to get a piece of animation finished and up on the screen (the animation assistants, the cleanup artists, the special effects animators, the inkers, the cell painters, the camera people, the editors, the sound editors, the film cutters) have all been replaced by software. These days I find myself working on scenes that are screen ready as soon as they’re done. Animated, inbetweened, inked, coloured, dubbed and ready to drop into the pre-edited sequence, they hop straight from the animator’s desk to the screen all in one smooth slide. It’s exciting in one way, but I confess I also find it quite sad. I suppose that sounds dumb to anyone who wasn’t involved in that old collaborative, hands on, wasteful, beautiful, extraordinarily fulfilling system. But I miss drawing, I miss working with an assistant and an inbetweener knowing that I’m passing on the decades of experience which was passed down to me the same way. I miss the real visceral satisfaction of carving a series of drawings from a series of blank pages.

But you can’t go back, and this line test has just been a walk down memory lane, nothing more. For me, it, and the time it represents, are over.

***It’s an interesting piece of movie history trivia to note that the wages back then were on something called ‘scale’ which is difficult to explain but basically means that if the directors didn’t credit you as an animator you didn’t get paid as an animator. So the credits on these older movies are often at least one movie behind the artist’s actual career.  You’ll see credits like ‘additional animator’ or ‘breakdown artist’ on movies where people were actually animating but hadn’t yet begun to be credited for it. (for example, my first inbetween job was on Land Before Time, but I wasn’t credited for it. My first additional animation scenes were actually on All Dogs Go to Heaven (LOVED THAT PROJECT) and my very first full animation position was on Thumblina.) back to reading

Dudes, stop reading your reviews!

In light of yet another instance of reviewer bashing I’d like to reproduce here a small post I made on the AbsoluteWrite forums re the oft repeated fallacy that writers can learn from their reviews:

Reviews are not the place to learn your faults as a writer. They’re just too varied and the comments in them too out of context to be of any use. The best way to learn this is to pick one’s favorite book and then go read a wide variety of reviews on it. It doesn’t take long to understand that if the author were to do the same in an effort to ‘learn their faults’ they’d end up so confused as to be paralyzed. For every person who thinks Murakami is a tedious maudlin waste of space, there is someone else who loves every word. For every one who thinks Sebastian Barry’s prose is genius there’s another who finds it overly dense and pretentious. You can’t write to a committee, not if you want to produce anything close to honest work ( note: I’m not talking about taking editorial or peer advice here. I think feedback is essential. Just not the kind of varied and subjective critique one gets from reviews)

I’d also like to – once again – repeat my post from June 2012 re reading one’s reviews and interacting with reviewers

Yesterday, as part of the comments thread in this post, Maeve from Yellow Brick Reads linked me to the above video. I think it’s hilarious – but it also sparked a reaction from me that I’d like to move from the comments section into the more open arena of an actual blog post. Here it is:

That Woody Allen clip is hilarious. You know I don’t read my reviews and haven’t for years*? Much against the current trend in social media where we have authors tweeting all their great reviews and freaking out over the bad, I just can’t do it. I don’t think reviewers should have to look over their shoulders for fear of authorial comment while they are working their way through an analysis. I feel they should be given the space to explore a work as they experienced it, and not as the author hoped or intended them to.

However, if a reviewer has a desire to work their way through a piece of writing using the author as reference or contrasting their actual reading experience with the author’s intentions, that’s another thing altogether. When the author is invited into the discussion in that manner, I think there is room for wonderful conversation and discovery. But (for me anyway) to engage with reviews on a casual basis would feel intrusive. (I’m also not too sure that wide scale authorial interaction with reviews won’t lead to a whole new type of selfconscious reviewer who maybe heightens the negativity or positivity of their reviews with an eye to nothing more than an entertaining engagement with the author. This would be good for marketing maybe, but for the art of reviewing itself and the genuine discussion of books for books’ sake? I don’t know. I doubt it.)

*(at the beginning of my career I was advised to read all my reviews so that I could ‘learn from the criticism’ This is bullshit advice. Every new author is told this by at least one person. Every new author should ignore it.)

ETA: Thank you to the reader who took time to point out my misuse of apostrophes in this post. I appreciate the very kind way you went about it, unfortunately when confronted by dyslexia the internet is often less than gentle and your decency is appreciated. I hope that I have managed to find and fix all the mistakes now – but I doubt it : )

Into the Grey Soundtrack tour: The penultimate!

And again I’m so behind on my musical posts! Without any blathering pop over to The Civilian Reader There Stefan has kindly posted the second last song from the sound track tour (a little blast of happy from Toots and the Maytals. Even if the sun ain’t shining where you are, I can guarantee Sweet and Dandy will put some summer in your step )

http://thebooksmugglers.com/2013/07/celine-kiernans-into-the-grey-a-playlist-giveaway.html

Into the Grey Review & Musical Post (step the fifth)

YIKES! I am behind on my musical posts! Poor Rachel over at the hilarious and wonderful Books I Done Read has had this post up since FRIDAY!! I should be whipped. Rush over there (and then stay to look around because – as if you didn’t know it – Raych’s book reviews are both hilarious and on the money (though we have disagreed twice – vehemently so!!!)

She’s giving away a copy of Into the Grey, has (apparently favorably!) reviewed the book and is playing some vaudeville for your delectation. Begone to her blog!

http://thebooksmugglers.com/2013/07/celine-kiernans-into-the-grey-a-playlist-giveaway.html

Into the Grey giveaway and Step four of Musical Tour

As most of you probably know, The Book Smugglers have reviewed Into the Grey (the first UK review! Yeay!) They’re also step four on the Into the Grey musical blog tour, and are giving away a copy of the book. All you have to do is go over to them and leave your name for a chance to win the UK edition! So off you go, for a another wee taste of Into the Grey and a gentle tune from Cat Stevens as he’s followed by his Moonshadow.

http://thebooksmugglers.com/2013/07/celine-kiernans-into-the-grey-a-playlist-giveaway.html