I have just completed six storyboards and sent them off to my agent to see what she thinks of them. There is one more I'd like to get into storyboard form and then I'll take a break. Putting a story into storyboard form is hard initial work, but it is satisfying to see the book beginning to appear. I usually have a problems in the plot or in the pace of the story that requires going back and redrawing and rewriting, but eventually the story attains a solid-enough feel to it. At that point I need to send it out for another opinion. The words and sketches are still fairly rough, their purpose is to give the general feel and structure of the intended book.
Since we are in the middle of winter I thought I would include the words of Kenneth Grahame from The Wind in the Willows. I always reread the book in winter, this year I blew through it before December had hardly begun. I wish I could write like he did, but if I could write with such grace and observation today I wonder who would read me? Here it is:
The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the inside of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquarade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering-even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screems of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on toward the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.
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