Daily Draw: 18.02 - 11.02 + Marrow stuff

No blog posts here for four weeks. For one week at least I have a half-decent excuse: I was SAVING A LIFE. (For the other three, I was sitting round in my pants watching Not Going Out on iPlayer).

It all started about five years ago when I signed up for the register of the Anthony Nolan trust at the Bristol University freshers fair. They had a stall nestled in between the Circus Skills Society and the Pottery Society (both of which I also joined).

And just as with juggling and pottery, nothing happened. Then one day, I got a call. Someone, somewhere had leukaemia (probably) and would die (possibly) unless a stranger like me would help them, for I was a match (you don't know the details). It's hard to say no really: once you've done the donation they give you a complimentary memory stick.

And so, after a draining catalogue of blood tests and blood re-tests, I did the donation. Marrow donation now is not like the old days though, or even like it was just a few years ago when you lay on your front and a surgeon went into your back with a pneumatic drill. The new, easier way is to have five days of injections of stem-cell stimulating hormones and then on the fifth day to go in to hospital and get hooked up to a machine for an ominous sounding harvest. The machine is an apheresis machine, essentially an extension of your circulatory system, with in-tubes and out-tubes placed into your arms and between these a giant centrifuge which spins your blood round and harvests off the excess stem cells you've been making all week before sending the rest back into you.

Here's me hooked up. I was like this for seven hours. I watched a lot of Mad Men. Now whenever I think of Don Draper I get a dull ache in my right arm.


So it was easier than the old days, but even so it wasn't quite as easy as I let myself believe it would be. Either I reacted badly or am a complete wuss, but the injections kicked the shit out of me. The lower back pain (basically in the pelvis, where there's the most marrow, all working overtime) was all-consuming. It's weird though, without the usual mystery of unexplained suffering or the more familiar self-loathing induced by self-inflicted suffering and the knowledge that it would all be over in a few days, the agony wasn't so agonizing. I couldn't really do much: couldn't work, couldn't read, couldn't walk, couldn't talk, but it was kind of okay (most of those things I don't do much anyway). Afterwards for ages I felt as if I'd just come back from holiday. It was like a holiday to the land of sickness, and as a tourist it was kind of interesting. Really made me glad to be back in the land of the alive and well though.

Daily Draw: 01.02 - 17.02

See how I've cleverly covered the fact that I missed a day here by carefully placing the bookmark across the associated page?

How to be romantic (sexually transmitted viral)

Simply select the below, copy it and paste it into your email and then send it out to your entire address book.

______

Roses are red
        Violets are blue
From A until Z
        I will love you

Will U B my Valentine?

______

Have I "gone viral" yet?

We had launch

What a successful book launch we had on Thursday. Not an all-out red carpet, screaming adolescents, a-list guest-list type proper book launch perhaps, but then it's not an all-out proper book. It's a small, unassuming and unexpectedly sweet book. And the launch too was all those things.

We sold all the books we brought, once people realised the candle was not for sale.

Public speaking me not good, um, [refers to notes] at.

Polite laughter.

Mother came along, which was nice. Father didn't because he's dancing on a float at the Rio Carnival, which is also nice (for him).

Next stop: Booker prize (or even: straight to Best of Booker?).

Love Letters Launch

On Monday, 2 February 2009 - formerly Groundhog Day, now, perhaps, Alfie-and-Betty day - Love Letters: A very adult alphabet book was released unto the world. Britain was so excited that the day was pretty much instantaneously declared a national holiday: schools closed, white statues of commemoration sprung up across the country and God himself showed his approval by making it snow.

Tonight is the Launch Celebration. It's in London, after work. Here are the details if you fancy coming along.

Apparently as yet no sales figures have come back (I hope that doesn't just mean that "no-sales" figures have come back) but I have been sticking my head into Borders and Waterstones branches across the South to make sure they're displayed correctly.

Have you seen the new Anova catalogue? We're on the Portico title spread, so that's nice.

And thanks to Emily Carrington-Wood, WATERSTONE'S PLYMOUTH DRAKECIR for my first five star "review".

Daily Draw: 13.01 - 01.02

Lots of blank pages and a few scribbles from our Bulgarian ski odyssey last week.

Gash back

An emergency flyer with a brief brief.

Can we have a flyer:

• * With anything you like on it, as long as it looks amazing
  
• * That shows that Florence and the Machine might play without saying it, as she may or may not be the special guest
  
• * That's on the theme of "the 90s", as in the decade, as that may or may not be the theme
  
• * All in the next ten minutes
  

No time to think or sketch (or live my own life). I instantly threw this up, bringing in flora and a 90s machine (see what I've done there?).


Then I did the old colour-switcheroo

• * When we said anything you like, we meant put in the gash logo
  

New year, old idea

The sketch-blog-o-sphere in January is full of people resolving to draw "for themselves" every day in 2009. This year amongst their numbers are some of my favourites like Frank Stockton and Stephen Collins, who's going the extra mile and making his look like finished pieces - rather than just midnight scans of shopping lists or phone doodles - and then putting jokes in too.
Publishing your resolutions - even when your readership is zero - transforms a promise to yourself into a promise to the world and you thus feel more compelled to keep it, or at least more guilty when you don't. Making private resolutions is basically saying "I'd like to do this, but I know I never will...", at least for me.
I too endeavor to do some sketchbook stuff every day in 2009 (except Jan 1-4, for that's when I watch my year's quota of shit movies) and to this end I have bought the nearest thing I could find to a sketchbook-diary hybrid, a Moleskine diary. It was about six times the price of any other day-to-view diaries in Rymans and the fact that I've shelled out over the odds alone should keep me going at least until March.

LoveLetterstheBook.com

Love Letters, my weighty Magnum Opus of over two years in gestation (really, two years: look) is finally coming to term. And this bit is the the labour bit. I've made a website for the book: lovelettersthebook.com and it took bloody ages. It's a labour of love, I guess.


It's all part of my cynical bid to "go viral", ie. promote the book for free from my bedroom. All the ingredients are there for your classic promo-site: a Flash game, presence on a prominent social networking site, downloads, an embedded video... and ta-da! One delicious viral. Now I just sit back and start thinking of puns for my Booker acceptance speech. Or is that like dropping flour and an egg into a bowl and saying ta-da! One delicious cake? Perhaps yes. I'd like Alfie and Betty to be the Crazy Frog of 2009... but how do you beat an amphibian on a motorbike (let alone one with mental health issues)?
It's Darwin's birthday soon, and thinking about Crazy Frog... isn't that just one evolutionary step up from the succesful fish-on-a-bicycle campaign Guinness ran in 1996? So perhaps there's the answer: the next big thing with the kids will be whatever is one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a frog riding whatever-is-one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a-motorbike... an iguana in a helicopter, say. Don't skip a step though: one day we'll be ready for primates in rocket-ships, but not yet. Space Chimps taught us that much.

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).

Through The Wire, to the limit

Unlike the Ting Tings, I've started many things: a daily exercise routine, writing a proper novel, reading a proper novel, learning how to knit... but I've finished very few. So it was with a certain sense of pride I watched the final episode of The Wire last night. Still distinctly behind the bandwagon, but nonetheless: 63 hours of watching is something of an achievement.

And whilst everyone likes Omar (arguably that's what won Obama the US election) I've always had a soft spot for ol' Captain Do-rag Bodie Broadus, as demonstrated by this awful bit of teenage fan-art I made a week or so ago.
He was good people.



Great, wonderful, amazing show. Awful, awful title music.
Sing it with me now: "When you walk through the garden..."

Thank Christ: sketches from the inside of a coach

A bit too much drawings of girlfriends and not enough drawings of headrests stuff over the last two posts.