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I know the anthology's in black and white, but I thought I'd paint it in sepia tones so the originals would look nice. (Thanks to my friend and website designer Dan Fone for catching the misspelling on the previous page I posted. Half the reason I post these things, I think! Better to catch 'em now...) Here's the second of four pages. The story's a bit quiet and reflective on the first two pages, but things change on the third page.



Three people have told me so far that she looks like a grown-up Marcie from Peanuts. I didn't try to make her to look that way, but it makes me kind of happy that she does.

Another Chaffy sighting! This time you have to work very hard to spot him in a white stone quarry. If you liked Fish-Head Steve and The DFC Olympics in the DFC, you can see their creator, Jamie Smart, signing copies of his book Ubu Bubu at Forbidden Planet in London this Thursday, 6-7pm. I'm sure I will go along because Jamie has been the most elusive DFC person to meet so far, and I am very determined to HUNT HIM DOWN. (Heh heh, if he's a no-show, you will now know why.)

Edit: Okay, I went back and fixed my spelling of 'Thursday' ... thanks, Gary!

Edit 2: Other publishing news... The Bologna Book Fair, the biggest annual event in children's publishing, has suddenly cut the Monday off the fair, making it three days instead of four... massive scandal insues! (details)
And WingedChariot Press have brought out the first iPhone picture book app, Surprise by Sylvia Van Ommen, details on the Write Away website.

Edit 3: Gah, Gary and I are on a bad run of misspelling this week... I caught one of his and he caught another one of mine on a Birdsong page (thier vs their). Why can't I spell this week? I even spent a year working as a friggin' copy editor... Grr!

Just did a bit more inking for the Birdsong anthology entry. I think I'm going to steer clear of digital and use some watercolour washes over it. Might actually save me time!

And hey, what is this about? The postman came with a little parcel from foo5, the DFC's Jamie Smart...

Yesterday afternoon I sat on the roof in the sun with Viviane's tomato plants, reading a friend's freshly written novel and doing the pencils for the story I'm submitting for the Birdsong anthology. Here's the first page:



I'm very excited for this anthology; it's going to feature work by the fabulous Warwick Johnson Cadwell (one of Britain's best illustrators, I think. You can spot his editorial illustrations in The Guardian), Will Kirkby (chamonkee, a guy with humble Live Journal beginnings like me, but whose work is taking off amazingly), Manga whizz kid and co-editor with Will naniiebim, the remarkable David O'Connell (tozocomic: have you seen the latest installments of Tozo... romance!) and two people whose work I'm getting to know: shakino and rakugaking. All our work is due Sept 6, so you should be hearing news about the publication sometime fairly soon after that. (This self-publishing stuff has so much quicker of a turn-around than children's books...) I was only going to take two pages, but I found it was actually easier to tell my story in four pages, so Will and Naniiebim let me have two more.

My Glasgow Auntie took Stuart and me out for lunch on Saturday, and we had a lovely day wandering the streets of London. I had to take her for a pastry at Yauatcha in Soho after my tasty visit there the other day with Ellen and Myla, mmm. Stuart took the second photo on this pretty, cafe-lined, hidden road off Oxford Street, called St Christopher's Place.



I just noticed some nice sketchbook drawings from my hometown, of Gasworks Park (thanks to Urban Sketchers). Ooh, have a look at their work on the Seattle section of the blog! I think this drawing's brilliant.

Yesterday I went with Ellen Lindner and Myla Goldberg to Yauatcha in Soho, just around the corner from Berwick Street Market, for the most amazing dim sum and teacake selection! Ellen and Myla are both sophisticated New York literary people, so I felt like we should have been talking about complicated plot structures and things, but all I could think about was the cake:






My favourites were the white macaroons filled with what I think was almond paste and poppy seeds... mmmm.
Okay, sated by cake, I can now say that Myla's fascinating (even more fascinating than cake, really!) and I'm going straight away to read her bestselling novel, Bee Season. (You can read over 300 reviews of it on Amazon.) Myla's also written another novel called Wickett's Remedy, and she and her comics-making husband Jason Little are working on new books while they're doing a summer house-swap to London from their place in Brooklyn. And if you haven't read Ellen Lindner's Coney-Island-set graphic novel, Undertow, then what are you doing? She's also posted some great sketches from her recent trip to southern India. We were talking about her latest graphic novel project, it sounds really exciting - keep an eye on her blog to see what she's up to.

Just to prove to myself that I AM working on the Birdsong anthology, I'm posting the text I wrote for it this morning. I think the comic is going to peter out into wordlessness as the story kicks in. It's about something that happened to me at Limehouse Basin when I first got to London and didn't know anyone except Stuart. So 'morning writing' today instead of a morning sketch. (Hmm, I think sketches look nicer. The text in this one doesn't do a whole lot, other than set it up.)