Sascha Martin’s Time Machine: Moping, Maps and Megafauna

I'm not really moping, of course, but progress does seem very slow at the moment. Time is dragging, but it's also racing away from me.

On the other hand, I know that Manuela is very busy behind the scenes and across the sea, working to design the map of Sascha's world that has to exist before she can even begin storyboarding our second book.

The map has its own separate project home at 99Designs, because it will form the backdrop for all subsequent books in the series, and while Sascha's school may be the epicentre each time, the catastrophe inevitably overflows into the surrounding area.

For the time machine disaster, Manuela's eye-in-the-sky will show the catastrophe in broad strokes and fine detail.

She's also designing Sascha's school crest.

In between, this overworked illustrator is finalising changes to the latest version of Sascha Martin's Rocket-Ship, a new edition that features our connection with record-breaking Australian rocketeer, Samantha Ridgeway.

And finally, in her spare time, Manuela's warming up her drawing hand to deal with Australian Pleistocene megafauna. At the top of this post is a page of preliminary sketches of Thylacine, the striped marsupial hunter which, though itself not strictly one of the megafauna, certainly lived alongside them and was a descendant of giants.