Writer
Looking for my written work? Click here for my debut novel The Farmer and the Fald and other writing projects.
Designer
Looking for Pinecone Penguin Design? Click here for my CV, portfolio and list of services.
Worldbuilder
Looking for my more fantasy content? Click here to see the slow expansion of the world the Elves' named:
Tyr-na-Dalka.
"It simply isn't an adventure worth telling...
The Farmer and the Fald
Join me on my latest adventure, as two years of work and and eighteen years of worldbuilding culminate in my first completed novella. Complimented with a detailed map, calendar and illustrations all beautifully hand drawn by the talented Hilary James.
Farmer Bundon never dreamed of fancy. But when, by chance; in the hedgerows, he discovers a fald’s egg (a dragon’s smaller, uglier cousin) fancy seems to find him regardless. He and his headstrong daughter Tyr’Dalka are brought unwillingly into a conflict, where his humble wisdom, her boundless honesty and a cowardly fald must do battle against the more contemptible shadows of human kind; the dark fires of avarice, pride and wrath.
“But there’s no forcing the hearts of the unwilling, lest you lend your hands to conquest. And we’re no conquerors, Tyr. Just a farmer, and his daughter.”
Through talks of destiny and deals with dragons; through the oaths of knights and the riddles of elves, the reluctant and weary family weave their thread, and lay their hands to drawing out the foul poisons of the world, when and wherever they might find them. And together they discover that adventures– true adventures, rarely resemble the stories.
The Farmer and the Fald is available digitally as an eBook, but also in print in both hardback and paperback editions.
- Amazon Reviews -
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"Make it simple, but significant."
Don Draper, Mad Men
Pinecone Penguin
Graphic Design & Illustration
Graphic Design
Logos and Brand Identity, letterheads, business cards, invoices... Lot of little bits of paper and pixels in the corner of your screen. You see them everyday. So they may as well look beautiful.
Stationery & Print
Posters, flyers and wedding invitations , sure. But all that merchandise as well; those pens, those t-shirts, those fancy mugs for the office. Designing for print is my bread and butter.
Illustration
Perhaps more of the personal touch? I have extensive experience in digital art and illustration, especially in the realms of concept and character design.
what you get with pinecone penguin
Ideas
First and foremost, a good design begins as a good idea. Or ten. Or a hundred. The way I work, you will have unlimited and varied choice on those crucial early steps.
Creativity
Taking these ideas to the next level, I will work upon a variety of examples and mock-ups. This is to give my clients as much creative choice as possible through the design process.
Research
What's your brand? What aesthetic are you after? What is tried and tested? There is a mountain of research to be done to better define your brief, and I can help you.
Attention*
*To detail. For me, a project is not completed until the client is 100% satisfied. Therefore I will always be available to update and tweak any designs in the future.
Implementation
Perhaps you already know what you're after, and you just need a designer to piece it all together. No problem. I enjoy working in tandem with my clients to ensure a perfect end product.
Communication
And of course, every step along the way I will keep in touch. Showing progress, sharing feedback and ensuring all my clients are kept in the loop.
"I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold."
J.R.R. Tolkien, on Fairy-Stories
An Introduction...
By Greenjack Jorkin
The Known World - Snow to Sand and Storm to Storm
My name is Greenjack Jorkin. And I am going to tell you a little something about the nature of this baffling world we call a home.
I will not endeavour to do this in my capacity as a Brother of the Temple. For in the hierarchy of the Brotherhood, my fellow Brothers and Sisters and even the Krillian himself would say that this world is “A gift from our most Noble Dragon”, and to question the nature of His miraculous gift is often regarded, with dubious yet passive judgement, as heresy.
But then to mind about such things is also seen as a form of heresy. An initiate might be disciplined for asking too many questions, but the disciplinarian would also be in breach of his beliefs for showing his ire for such mundane behaviour.
Never underestimate the power of theological one-upmanship. For in the Dragon’s Temple tolerance is the currency of the faithful. The more tolerant you are, the stronger your faith. So it is of great importance to not mind about things. Thievery? Murder? Betrayal? You shall find peace if you simply stop minding. Famine? Frost? Earthquakes? You shall find peace if you simply stop minding.
Tolerance, it seems, is a fine banner to fight beneath. As it requires nothing from it’s bearer. The tolerant mask slips slowly with every shrug of the faithful’s shoulders, until their true face is shown. And it is often one of apathy.
And apathy will never deign to explain the world.
Nor will I try and explain from the perspective of a Natural Philosopher, for many sins drive the hearts and hands of that order. A self-serving atheism has settled within their ranks, and they hold to their belief (or lack thereof) as fanatically as any witch or weaver might hold to theirs.
Their view is one of bleak happenstance. With humanity, in their eyes, no more than a parasite upon this floating rock of a world. It is a common trait amongst the ranks of the “enlightened” to do away with religion, who see belief as a tool of kings and priests to better control an unruly populace. But stories predate monarchies and theocracies, and all any religion really is at it’s most rudimentary level is a set of cautionary or celebratory fables to better help guide lost souls toward the good.
But to view this miraculous world as no more than a rock infested with humanity is to also view your body as no more than a skeleton infested with flesh and blood.
I have the rather unique position of being both theologian and philosopher. And can see with unparalleled clarity that neither Temple nor Studium have the right of it, for they share a common thread… and that is that reality and spirituality are somehow diametrically opposed to one another. When in reality, true reality, one is formed by the other.
It is with our eyes that we are gifted sight, through refractions and distortions of light and shadow. It is with our ears that vibrations in the air are deciphered and decoded into sounds. Our skin translates tiny changes of air pressure into temperature… so how is it such wise and clever men can attest that our perceptions do not shape nor impact the world? When without such perception, sight, smell, hearing, the world would be indistinguishable from a dreamscape. Just drifting energy flowing through an eternal nothingness.
In the Temples of the Dragon’s Prayer, we heed the counsel of many long dead philosophers (or at least we are meant to), many of them of faerish descent. Elder Methwyn-o-Clydd was one such elf, who, after centuries of thought and contemplation gave a rare, albeit brief, written account.
It is only two lines. The only two he wrote in his two-centuries of teaching.
Elves did not write often, you understand. The nature of the faerfolk’s undying memory rendered the practice quite obsolete. Paper and parchment were not yet in common use, so if words needed to be marked they were always marked in stone, which is where we found his first, and only, lesson. Marked at the alter of our most Noble Dragon here in the Temple of Rhothodân.
Those that know the prayer, do not speak it.
Those that speak the prayer, do not know it.
This leaves me in the quite precarious position of walking with a foot either side of knowledge and ignorance. My spoken words will never carry the truth I know in my heart, but perhaps they will carry some meaning, and thus provide a foundation of understanding to better build your own internal truth. With much risk, I am aware, of being misunderstood, misconstrued and misremembered. Man delight so, I’m sure you’ve noticed, in hearing only what they want to hear. And disregarding anything hat might give them pause for thought. It makes things easier, I’ve no doubt.
But it is a lie, all the same. So be wise, and rid yourself of any preconceived notions that truth boasts any adaptability to circumstance. It does not. And never has. Truth is as gold; inert, mouldable for purpose, true enough. But the shape never changes its original worth. And time never tarnishes it’s sheen.
For the first lesson one must always learn (if one is foolish enough to go asking questions of this bemusing world) is that those who claim to know the answers already; know only of their own petty certitude. And nothing more.
My fellow Brothers within the Temple are fine examples of such men. As well as my peers within the Order of Natural Philosophy… for certitude is bolstered by certitude. And truth, in their minds, is found in the studious nodding of a hundred or so weary, befuddled, old men. One need look no further than that, not within the orders of the self-appointedly wise.
I remember, back as a rather bookish boy of nine or ten years; I was gifted a large leather bound tome by my Lord Merchant father. It was named thus; “Certainties of the Natural World – An Explanation” it was a collection of accounts and natural studies written by the much esteemed Krillian Stuttmynd in the year of 799 by Sathillian Reckoning. It detailed much about the nature of beasts and the woodlands, mountains and fens of our much beloved isles.
It was a fair glossary, make no mistake. It listed in its pages every known variety of mushroom, for example. It listed every seed native to the Eastern Isles as well as every tree, bush and flower these seeds grew into. My favourite part was the section on beasts, in particular the bestial order of “Dalkys’Sanguinys” —dragons; and their many monstrous cousins. Wyverns, falds and manticores. Griffons, cockatrices and knuckers. I was particularly excited, as the title of the great tome boasted of ‘an explanation’… where these beasts came from. Why they differ so extremely to other, more conventional animals. How dragons breathed fire. How manticores can fly. And how, all of them, could or can, seemingly, comprehend human speech and behaviour.
But it explained none of that.
Krillian Stuttmynd detailed, richly, how an acorn grows into an oak. From seed, to sapling to tree. But he never explained why. I remember thinking then, as a boy of ten, as I think now… That this book was not ‘an explanation’. It was simply a list of names. A tome of observations. With new names created and inserted to fill any blanks.
But names aren’t explanations.
And so, for the sake of my younger self’s curiosity, I aim to give some explanation of this, our natural world. Free of certainty, the toxic weed that runs wild in any scholarly garden. Free of assertion, as well. The world is complicated enough without me adding any of my own meandering, petty guesses. And free, for the most part, of pomposity. There will certainly be some, for I, surely, could not be named a natural philosopher without it.
The Known world spans an estimated eight-thousand miles east to west, and approximately five-thousand miles north to south. When one travels far enough in any direction one is met with an elemental barrier.
East and West are guarded by impenetrable storms and angry seas that crash and thunder over a labyrinth of razor sharp, mountainous rocks.
While north is shielded by undying blizzards, and walls of ice nearing a hundred feet high, careening and crashing constantly into a frozen sea.
And south is an endless waste of sand and salt, cooked so hot by the sun that great lakes of glass run static in the valleys between each dune, like still un-rushing rivers.
But as we adventure from snow to sand and storm to storm, in the world the elves names Tyr-na-Dalka, let us start where the elven stories start, with the cold and dismal North.
