Thursday, August 27, 2009

Loud Story



Loud Story was a book idea I was developing a while ago which pretty quickly ran out of steam. It plays with the neat kind of accidents that can occur when predictive text goes wrong: when pint accidentally becomes riot, kiss becomes lips, baker becomes cakes and all that stuff. Textonyms, these words are apparently called.

Nowadays of course anyone with any self-respect has an iPhone - or at the very least a Blackberry- and so uses a miniature QWERTY keyboard, making the whole idea redundant. Which is a shame.



























Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Daily Draw: 22.07 - 18.08

A load of Daily Drawings, and a couple of blank pages too- because it is the holiday season after all. I'm allowed to relax for five minutes, right?



I barely drew "for fun" all of this week in fact, because I was swamped, flooded and festooned with work. Mainly with completing 60+ colour illustrations for a pair of books coming out on Mothers Day and Fathers Day next year, which is quite exciting. Probably worth getting pregnant for now, if you're not a parent already, just so you can legitimately enjoy them (or one of them, at least).






I had to get a number of jobs completed before I left for a fortnights jaunt - split between Croatia and Italy - and as my departure date loomed I was working very long days indeed. I was at the desk still at 1am on the Monday morning, and we had to leave at 3am. That is what they call "the joy of freelance".



We stayed in Razanj, a little village about an hours drive up the Croatian coast from Split. In Croatia beaches as you and I know them are yet to be invented: instead they have concrete shelves built into and over the rocky shores. They are almost better though because you can jump off the shelves and impress girls and you don't get sand kicked in your face by bigger boys.


It was just me and Charlotte. We've never really done a couples holiday before. We went to Morocco last year, but then we were too busy fearing for our lives to allow for any romance.


It was pretty boring until we bought a pack of playing cards.


At the end of the week we went back down to Split and took an overnight ferry to Ancona (that's in Italy). I was led to believe this would be the glamour-high-point of the trip, but once we'd finished our warm pre-made bottle gin and tonic on the top deck it was a case of trying to sleep curled up on the floor of the engine room on a bed of towels, which wasn't all that fun.


The Italy chapter, in which we joined Charlotte's whole family and our friends Jess and Sophie, was all based around food: specifically those tomato, mozzarella and basil salads covered with balsamic. BBMTs, the Italians probably call them.


The two weeks were quite different. Croatia was so relaxed we were almost completely still for the whole time. In Italy there were ten of us, almost all teenage girls, and so was lots and lots of fast-talking and high-screaming and sobbing and general drama. There were probably more words machine-gunned out in any given minute of week two than the total that were uttered by me and Char combined in week one.