Text Sample for The Frozen Memory story - bronia
For this text sample, I imagined the book being formatted as a heavily illustrated book for ages 7-11. (Taking Marcia Williams’ work as a model, particularly Archie’s War).
I like the idea of the illustrations being a blended collage/montage with layers of text, illustration, photos, pull out flaps with handwritten letters and extra ephemera. I also envisaged that in some of the illustrations there would be ‘speech bubbles’ where the characters say things that are not in the main body of the text.
I’d also envisage that a lot of extra infor about the characters comes through the illustartions which is not in the text at all.
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Hi I’m Matt. My friends call me Madcap Matt because I spend every spare minute making wild and wacky inventions.
Like the time when I found a box of old umbrellas on the street…and decided I could use them to pick up alien signals from outer space.
Or the time I redesigned our garden shed as a multi-layered exercise gym for Victor, my pet rabbit.
For some reason, people sometimes get a bit perturbed by my inventions.
I can’t think why.
Here are some of my heroes:
Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel (A Dutchman who invented the first submarine in 1620.
William George Armstrong, (English, 1810-1900) –inventor of the hydraulic crane
Vitaly Mikhaylovich Abalakov, (Russia,1906-1986) inventor the gearless ice climbing anchor.
And of course
Mori Lakhovsky, my grandfather.
Mori was an inventor in Russia.
In 1932 he came to England to work on top secret inventions that are too highly classified to mention here, but these days he mostly invents ice cream. He lives by himself in his own house. The place is full of his inventions and he’s always collecting stuff that might come in handy one day.
Mori is an ice cream inventor extraordinaire. He makes all his own ices. He always says to me “I’ve invented more ice cream flavours than you’ve had hot dinners” . This is probably true. I’d prefer one of Mori’s delicious ice creams to a hot dinner any day of the week.
Mori sells his ices around our town (picture of the van with Mori vending)
His house is on my way home from school, and I pop in and visit him everyday.
(picture of Mori’s house, full of inventor’s stuff particularly pertaining to ice cream making - unorthodox mixing equipment, jars of unusual flavouring, toppling piles of recipe books, scribbled ideas and diagrams for new flavours…and a huge wall of ‘freezer drawers’ labelled with different flavours)
He always gives me a sample of what he’s working on. (Illustration- with speech bubbles?
Mori: Try this… the new Birthday extravaganza….contains crumbs of actual birthday cake with the squeeky aftertaste of balloons….
Matt: Mmm…great….it’s a little rubbery though….)
Sometimes I get to go out on the round with him (more illustrations and speech bubbles, talking to customers)
One day we were about to get in the van when Mori realised he didn’t have the keys. (illus: speech bubbles Matt: Where did you last have them? Mori :I can’t remember…)
Instead of going and hunting for them, he opened a special hidden freezer compartment that I’d never seen before, and took out a spoonful of a particularly unusual looking ice cream (illus…)
“Aha!” he said.”Of course, the keys are in the bird bath where I left them - would you do me a favour and run and get them Matt?” So I did, and there they were. (illus)
“But how did you work it out?” i said.
Mori explained that he’d been forgetting a few things lately, so he’d invented a way of storing important memories in his ice creams, so he could find them whenever he wanted.
In the van, Mori showed me the special machine he’d invented for extracting and freezing the memories. (Illus)
“What other memories have you stored, apart from the one about the keys?” I wanted to know.
“Memories are very delicate things” said Mori. “And as I get older, there are many things that are starting to slip away from me. I’d never want to forget, for example, how I met your grandma.”
I knew that grandma had died when i was only 2, and i couldn’t really remember what she was like. Now was my chance to find out. “So can you tell me how you met?” I asked.
“Better than that - I can show you” said Mori. With that, he took out another ice cream flavour from the special freezer and offered me the spoon.
At first the ice cream had the taste of violets, then it changed to oranges and cinamon. When I looked up, the inside of the van had melted away and I was standing under a tree.
(illus. tree, evening, Russia. market stalls in the distance. A fairground? Mori is selling ice cream and his future wife is working on an old fashioned merrigoround….?)
(now go fully in to the memory - double page opens up even wide, folds out. map of the fairground, Mori shows Matt around the memory . text (speech bubbles?) about how the story went eg. “we first met at midnight when she was sweeping up around the merrigoround” …. illustrations/pullout text-flaps could include love letters, from a period during which the couple were separated by distance, old photos of them, the fair, postcards….)
3 years ago • Notes