My, my, how can you resist me?

The festive tv schedule was distinctly lacking this year, and so I failed to meet my usual quota of awful family-friendly movies. I did however manage to see Mamma Mia! on DVD though. Whilst I watched it I drew this.


I bought myself a new MacBook Pro for Christmas, and loaded it up with all the latest Creative Suite stuff too. Clearly it doesn't mean anything I do is going to be better, but it can at least now all be done from one armchair - as this picture was - using the built in iSight camera to take rubbishy photos of pages held up in front of it.

Coffee and TV

Not sure what this plastic milk bottle was doing on our coffee table as we watched The Pixar Story yesterday: we buy our milk in those plastic bladders. That's how green a household we are. In fact, we're so green we haven't even got the proper plastic refillable jug you get, that you pour your bladder-milk into again and again. We have to put ours in the one jug we have got: a big heavy glass thing that we're renting with the house. It doesn't fit in the fridge, so the milk doesn't last long and invariably ends up stinking on the counter for a couple of days before being poured down the sink, but still... that's a price we're prepared to pay for the sake of the environment. Nice, aren't we?

More Gash type

As a treat, the Gash crowd let me have carte blanche (not literally, I still had to draw round the gash logo) on type design for this latest flyer.

IA: it's physical

I received a couple of the first copies of Love Letters in the post the other day, it's all very exciting. It looks really, really nice (and by nice I mean pink). All the colours and little details have come out perfectly. I'm pleased too with the thickness of it: the hard-back binding and 64 pages make it a veritable tome... definitely something that seems worth £4.99 anyway.

I'm sick of waiting for it to come out now. There's an impatient part of me that wishes it was battling away in the pre-Christmas promotional melee, but it would be near impossible for a nobody like me to take on books of the likes of Ross and Brand (I knew I should have done A is for Andrew-Sachs'-granddaughter), let alone Paul O'Grady, and plus the Valentines' market is undeniably more relevant.

Behind the scenes, all is apparently going well. A couple of major retailers have taken the book "on promotion", though I'm not entirely sure what that means, and there's an American publisher taking on a co-edition, though I don't know what that means either... I think basically someone changes all the s's into zs and then they sell it stateside.

Otherwise I'm working on building the website, lovelettersthebook.com, at the moment, which is taking longer than I expected but should be quite fun. And the book is up on Amazon too. You know that link on Amazon pages which says "I am the author...."? I can click that now. (I haven't yet, but I can).