An idea came to mind this week, so I'm acting on it. I'm asking people to suggest ways I could try to sell 500 of my books in a month. If I succeed, I'll reward them by drawing a page of comic strip. I'm holding a Zoom meeting on Friday night to take suggestions, let's see if anyone turns up.
I've tried, tentatively, to get back to writing my fourth book, Twelfth Thing. I worked on it for probably a day and bit at the start of October, then it got batted out of the way by classes, Socks shows, Pirate themed birthday parties, Christmas, New Year and suddenly it's now again. So, after the least book-oriented period since I started (Findlay Macbeth was written in December 2019 and I was busy drawing it right through January last year, and I didn't take a month's gap between either of the other two books, as this work sheet attests), I'm trying to get into it again. I broke the back of it with the fight scene you see scribbled above. I'm hoping nobody can make too much of it out, as I don't want you to get spoilers too early. As ever, I find myself doing a lot of reading around the subject and, in the case of Twelfth Night, I'm finding that all my clever insights into sexuality in the play are pretty basic and everyone's been dealing with them for years. So far no-one appears to have included an alien parasite monster in their adaptations, that I've found, but I won't be surprised to come across one.
Did my first Comic Art Masterclass of the year on Monday, which was a great start to the week, and my efforts to email every school in the country have been continuing (at a rate of slightly fewer than 500 emails a day, that being the gmail limit). I'm starting to get responses, which bodes well.
I've also had responses to a Twitter mail out I did this week asking people if they'd review my books. It's galling not having had a single review yet, but I realise you're not going to get one until you get out there and thrust it down peoples throats. So that's what I did, and currently three people have copies of two books apiece en route to them through the mail. Though whether one can set too much store by the mail at the moment is a moot point. As a result of covid and other complications, the Royal Mail has been performing very badly this past month (so Watchdog told us on the telly last night). Anecdotally I can confirm we had two batches of Christmas cards that had taken over a fortnight to arrive, and we're definitely not getting a daily delivery at the moment. They have my sympathy, their job's not easy. (Plus I got all the copies of my last book emailed out well before the troubles started, so I'm alright Jack).
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