You can sit here, if you like

I haven't drawn a comic strip for a long time.

No one asks "why not?"

Lolcats, now without the lols

I can has cheezburger


I can has... cheezy vectors


I can has... cheezus christ

Start the Weak drawing

Likenesses have never been my strong point, so I really need to practice drawing them.

The trouble is, when it comes to thinking of people to draw I can only ever think of two people: Andrew Marr and Lily Allen, and I've tried to draw them already (here and here).

Still, here's another quick crack at Andy.

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.