Abner
a novel scrapbook…
Abner is my 80k-word novel written for young teens. It tells the tale of a twelve-year-old boy, called Abner, who lives in a world which flooded long ago – long before anyone can remember. A scattered humanity continues to carve out its existence on wooden rigs high above the sea and on wayfaring ships. Abner has only just inherited his own ship when it is fatally damaged during a storm. Without a sea-worthy vessel, all his hopes and dreams for a life of captaincy appear to be dashed and sunk until he meets the enigmatic Silas, whose simple offer of help seems cloaked within a deeper mystery. A novice captain, a broken ship, a storm-wrecked ocean planet… what on earth could go wrong?
This scrapbook is just a small collection of bits and bobs connected with the tale in some way…
This is a sketch of the first rig in the novel, Fenlock. Abner and his crew find safety here during the storm that occurs at the start of the novel. 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 low-grade accommodation 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 the Second World War. 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.
As I wrote the moment when Abner first sets sail, catching the wind to carve a path on the sea away from Fenlock Rig, this was the track that came to mind. Beautiful! Gentle yet affirming, upbeat yet restrained, there’s something wide and expansive in it like the sea and the far horizon. It evokes something of a fresh, bright morning, too. Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is an act of remembering; memorable lines are repeated over and over, and we can get lost in the sound.
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, there was a remarkable incident where 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 under water 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!
Max Richter again… This piece reminds me very much of the novel’s climax: the unrelentingness, the speed, the calm and then the sudden change in key and tempo, the abrupt end giving a sense of triumph and destruction intermingled.
I am delighted that Ambassador International have accepted the book for publication. They aim to have it on the shelves by 2024. Yipee!
Below is a short trailer for the novel, created using as much AI as possible.
- Music: Infraction ‘Heroes’
- Text: ChatGPT
- Art: Stable Diffusion
- Animation: Pika Labs
West Folio 