I’ve been throwing all manner of content at Tik Tok hoping something really sticks. I’m generating encouraging engagement and have over 50 followers. Maybe not too bad after just a couple weeks and only a very few personal contacts added. Discovering Procreate’s animation assist function has been a revelation! I had been using its time-lapse to make animations but it was very hit and miss. Now I’ve already made a couple decent animations! Rudimentary, but as with all my artwork it comes with the proviso: I’m a writer who draws. Anyway, here’s what I wrote for Jack’s backstory. It’s rough, but the ideas are there and I’ve found a few more beats to put into the set up of how Gideon will challenge their friendship (as if, dear reader – they are friends for life, but the “harder battle you see now, is the sweeter the victory!.”
Jack character intro:
Origin story: Living on rooftops to evade capture as a repeated workhouse runaway (with a magistrate personally invested with catching him and prosecuting him for the theft of the rags they’d given him to wear.), Jack feels safe and free at height. The Docks Mob took great delight in putting food and drink and blankets in the baskets Jack would drop.
When the City’s big soapworks were being built, steeplejacks suddenly found themselves in a position of earning ten shillings a day or more. Albert, an ex boxer and parish steeple-climber, (remarkably nimble for such a huge bear of a man) knew of Jack and told him if he could fetch the beads he had put on the weathervane of St Timothy’s, he would take him on as apprentice and teach him all the tricks of the trade, plus carptentry, masonry, and many diverse skills, and pay him a shilling a day. This is a chance of real freedom for Jack…and giving him ideas of asking Georgia to marry him like he did when they were both workhouse kids.
Side story: “Sunday Job” Jack spends all his Sunday preparing a treat for his forever friend Georgia. He flies a kite over an overhanging branch of a tree over the gorge. He uses the kitestring to pull twine then rope, then climbs and inspects the tree: ‘that’s as sound as you like.’ He makes a rope-swing like none other, with pulleys for easy hauling up and lowering down.
Georgia’s uncertain at first, but finally laughs and says why not? Perfectly safe, Jack assures her. He hoists her up. Cut from her face lit up by the golden glow, then pan out to the sunset over the estuary. “Jack it’s beautiful!”
“Have a swing!” he shouts back and she does. It’s thrilling, but she’s a little bit worried that this Jack’s mad idea of courtship. To herself: I’ll still never be a wife though, not even to you, Jack.