Going quietly

A belly full of Crista's delicious home made key lime pie and a head full of tired.

I'm heading off to Sheffield and then Scotland very early tomorrow for a week of music, and hopefully some writing and some not being anywhere near a computer.

Bye now.

Inside out

Just now I'm airing a borrowed tent in the studio and waiting for the rain to stop, so that I can go and buy a sleeping bag (not the best sign really, weatherwise). I think that I am going away for a bit.

Scratches walls

Trying to plot some kind of escape from a head-swimming, too-many-naps-taking, not-enough-words-writing case of doldrums and doom, longer than ten lovely minutes in this secret spot. Thwarted fairly amusingly at every turn so far, but there might yet be hope.



This is a picture of the beautiful detailing of my violin bow, which I inherited from Dr Robert Bolton, the late husband of my Grandmother Joyce. He was a very amazing man. Playing with that bow helped cheer me through today.

Salty hair

I want salty hair, too.


(Tove Jansson)

Drowsy drawl

It's been a while since I put any noises here.

Sun drowsy looping.mp3

One wish

Among many.

What I really want is a rope swing over a lake though.

Dexter's life without me

I was told this was a big secret a week or so ago, but I guess they've announced it on their website so I can announce it too. Dexter Bexley & the Big Blue Beastie has been shortlisted for an Early Years award. Which is pretty great, even if they have got the title wrong on the website...

Such a beautiful day. Makes me dream of being in Italy again.
Even while I'm barely scraping through getting-anything-done-wise just now, I'm very aware what a privilege it is to be able to take a notebook and sketchbook to the park and still think you've done a morning's work. Even better to have a friend with a similar enough working practice that I don't have to do it on my own for once.

Puddled Mride

I'm feeling about as muddled as I ever have,
but look, I find an amazon review for Dexter Bexley like this:

"My children, ages 3 and 7, insist that I read this book to them every night. My 3 year old has memorized the words so that she can "read" along with me. It's a wonderful story with beautiful illustration. We love it so much, we are now searching for everything by Joel Stewart to add to our collection."

And I feel about as proud as I ever have, too.

I had one book that I memorized that way as a child, and it has remained that important ever since.

Picnic in the rain, in a graveyard.

Yes, exactly that kind of day, (nice picnic though).

Klappe Zu, Affe Tot

Pictures from my friend Laura Trevail's installation at Toynbee studios this evening. There were lovely, funny, strange things in the other room too, the room with light and no smoke machine etc, but I didn't photograph them well.

In other news: As much as I liked the jungle effect in my studio, this is entirely the wrong end of the year to be adding darkness and seasonal affective disorder to the disorder rota, so the tree is now strung up and lopped thin.

And I wrote a good deal more story. In fact I wrote about making trees shrink...

Late this evening I was privileged enough to watch my very own copy of this oh-so-beautiful film (friends in far places, and many thanks to them).

If Kafka were a swede

I'm sitting here in a bit of a dappled green jungly place, because the Wysteria outside my window got very heavy with foliage and broke from the wall. It hangs and scrapes and squeeks my window and I ought to go out there with the ladder and sort it out.

I had a journey to the Kafka nightmare of Ikea yesterday. I think the free bus is ferrying people into the back there and turning them into flatpack furniture like Soylent Green. Cry out 'MDF is people!' before it is too late. But I got some frames to paint up for some of my brush paintings. And a light for my easel, which is in a dark corner.

I've written a chunk of story today, and fully plan to do more. I feel at the best of times that I can write in a month what a 'proper author' might in a couple of days, but some things get done.

I got such nice things in the post today! But still no copies of my own book...

I've been watching a load of Andrew Bird on youtube. He's a pretentious man isn't he? Like a stick-in-the-mud I only really loved the silly swing stuff he used to do, mostly because his oh-so-proper voice works better there, for me. But he can play that fiddle. It's been making me practice again. He's rather pretty, too.

Here's some doomed customers:

Hoping not to burst

At last, and in the face of ultimate gloom, I think I hopped over a huge wall of plot and might be able to write this silly story through to the end! And I did it by blowing bubbles.

Scope and horror

Meh, I'm struggling a little.

What's good? Yesterday I had a scene to write for the second Stanley Wells Mystery and two words into it I suddenly realized that I had once written a picture book that I hadn't finished and that it would slot into that spot virtually unchanged. We'll see what survives in the end, but still.

I have been offered a very interesting picture book by a publisher in New York. It may or may not be about this woman and her interesting life and (for me at least) face. The state of the US economy makes working direct for the US a much less financially exciting prospect than it used to be, but it's a really unusual project and I fully plan to fit it in.

On friday Crista moved into the attic studio here (where I used to live). Already she has made the place so lovely, and sometimes I am glad to visit up there because she is nice to visit, and because I miss it anyway.

I've no truck with astrology whatsoever, but I stumbled over my horoscope today and it was so cruelly accurate that I threw the paper on the floor and laughed in a forced kind of way.

{Edit: Oh, and I've been baking lots of bread, and even making cup-cakes with lemon in and stuff and that's good}

Hello

Welcome, or welcome back. I haven't really finished setting this up, but hello all the same.