My earliest known comic.

Shark and Lobster - a diary sketch book of character development work

One of my first books was Shark and Lobster's Amazing Undersea Adventure - a tale of Shark, who is afraid of Tigers, and his best friend Lobster.
It was very hard to write - I had already written one draft years before when I was still in school, and now I had to learn how to rewrite and edit and make a picture book story of it.
One thing I did then, which I've kept up since, is make a diary for my characters to see what they got up to and who they actually were.
I did find out a lot about Shark and Lobster this way, almost none of it made it into the book, but that's not the point of character development work.

I thought it would be nice to stick it on my blog so that you can see how I work (or how I worked when I was starting out in 2001 - I've gone lest wistful over the years, but my approach is still very similar).
Here you go!

Doing the Promo Thing

I'm making animated GIFs of all my novelty books.
Please send help, or cookies, or say well done or something.

If you think that having books published means that people do all your promo for you, boo you are wrong. Almost all of us need to sort out our own author pictures, websites, reading tours and whatnot.

In good news, the basement now has a light tent.

MORE SOON.