Whenever you are writing a story, there are lots of bits and pieces that go into the mix. This scrapbook is just a small collection of some of the bits and pieces connected with Abner in some way…
This is a sketch of the first rig in the novel, Fenlock. Abner and his crew find safety here during the opening storm. It is here, on Fenlock, that he discovers the fatal damage to his ship, and it is here that he meets Silas. Fenlock was, at one time, a fishing and sea-farming rig. Now, however, it makes a trade offering cheap lodgings to passing vessels. As such, it has a slight notoriety for rough roguishness. One of the roughest rogues on the rig is Molly, a proprietress and longstanding friend of Abner.
Imagine my surprise when partway through writing Abner, I came across these structures online. They are the Red Sand Sea Forts, relics of World War II. Many such facilities were installed around the coast of Britain during the conflict. Abandoned after the war and left to rust, they have, over the years, inspired various uses. Some have been inhabited from time to time, one was used as the base for a pirate radio station, and one has been unofficially declared to be the micro-nation ‘Sealander’! You can read more about various sea forts here.
In the novel, I give almost no description of how the main characters look. This is deliberate. Growing up, I enjoyed stories that left much of a character’s appearance to my imagination. Above is the only image of the three main players, and even this is certainly not meant to be definitive! I doodled it early on, just to help me think of the characters. Astor was eventually renamed Silas, a name chosen because of the Elliot novel Silas Marner, which sounds like ‘mariner’, and because it is an anagram of ‘sails’. I also just like it!
I found this image whilst browsing around online and felt it captured perfectly a key moment towards the end of the novel. I’m afraid I have no info about whose it is. For a while, the novel was going to be called ‘Abner: Red Dawn in the West’, but that’s a terrible title! I still love the image, though.
Here’s another image I found online. Again, it captures a key moment – a dream of Abner’s. In it, he is remembering his father. The image captures the feeling of the moment perfectly, although I doubt Abner would be wearing denim dungarees!
In July 2021, a remarkable incident occurred when a gas leak from an underwater pipeline operated by Pemex in the Gulf of Mexico caused the ocean to catch fire. You can read about the details and see video footage here. The sight of flames rising up from underwater is truly incredible. Now, not to give any spoilers, but aside from being concerned about the actual situation, that this was even possible interested me… greatly!
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