Having been teaching English literature as part of my day job for the last few years, I thought I really ought to put some of this knowledge together to create my own novel. So, for my 50th birthday treat, I set a little book-writing challenge for myself. I took some of the characters and plot lines from the literary texts my students were studying at the time and blended them together with a few twists of my own and settled down over a two week period to write the book. The result was the first draft of The Wizard’s Mission – an epic fantasy novel about the titular wizard who travels across the fantasy world to investigate a mystery intertwined with the political and religious intrigue in a grand imperial palace. There are plenty of twists and turns and allusions.
It took about a month to edit and proofread the draft and to create the cover (described in a separate post). On the whole, writing and publishing the novel was the easy part. Marketing it is an entirely different matter. To help with the marketing, I have been painting illustrations of some of the main scenes in the story. These are just quick oil paint on paper sketches – I might one day produce some proper finished paintings on canvas – or perhaps some of my creative students can tidy up these rough sketches for me. In any case, in this post I share the illustrations so far…
You can see videos of some of these paintings being created via this QR code:
Painting 1: The Grand Library – the story starts with a scribe being appointed on an important fact-finding mission.
Painting 2: Pirates in the Fog – the story continues when the scribe encounters a mysterious fog and equally mysterious strangers.
Painting 3: Dispelling the Mist – the scribe narrator meets the titular wizard.
Painting 4: Ogre Battle – the wizard battles a ferocious ogre.
Painting 5: Trek across the Moors – the main characters trek across the dangerous moors.
Painting 6: River Squirm – one of the main characters, a half ogre lad who joins the titular wizard on his titular mission, finds a curious pet.
Painting 7: Elvish Magic – the half-ogre is mesmerised by a magic vision reflected in a puddle in an enchanted forest.
Painting 8: The Tailor of Ciderford – the half-ogre gets new clothes as the characters return to civilisation.
Painting 9: Lord Gonzalo – the heroes arrive at the imperial palace and Lord Gonzalo introduces some details of the wizard’s secretive mission involving dark magic, dangerous liaisons and sinister political intrigue (note: this painted sketch is water colour).
These illustrations cover approximately the first third of the novel, so there’ll be plenty more to come. Any creative students who would like to help illustrate this work, please do have a go at fixing up these images. If anybody wants to read the epic story, the original version is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Mission-Terry-Matthews-ebook/dp/B0D3B7SQQY
Bro Lord Gonzalo?!