Knackered

I'm currently in the middle of a marathon stint at the day job - working eight out of nine days with each day involving a knackering nine hour shift. I generally get home around 10.30pm, eat, watch that evening's Daily Show on Sky+ and then crawl into bed cursing and aching. I then get around seven hours sleep before having to drag myself out of the pit to help bath Dylan and Connor who, at that time of the morning, only have two settings - loud and, er, louder.

The good thing is that it's late July and I'm yet to take a single day's paid holiday from work, meaning I have 28 to take between now and the end of the year. The family and I are disappearing to Wales for our first holiday together towards the end of August and then I'm off for two weeks in both September and October. There will be a big recharging of batteries but I'm also hoping to get a lot of work done. I still have three one-shots and a short story to get finished before the end of the year and I'm determined to stick to that schedule.

* Blood Psi hit comic stores in the States on Wednesday - a week before I expected it to. As ever I'd have liked to get more advance publicity for the book but we probably did better on that front than with Hero Killers. Still, it's the one area of the operation that could be a lot stronger and I'm going to be pushing like crazy to get coverage on CBR and Newsarama for Septic Isle, Brothers and Tim Skinner .

* A few of my favourite blogs right now...
http://www.janeespenson.com/
Jane Espenson used to write for Buffy and is now an executive producer type bigwig on Battlestar Galactica. She offers up loads of excellent advice for TV writers but many of her tips can be easily adapted for any type of creative writing, including comics.

http://paulcornell.blogspot.com/
Yep, the guy who wrote the Human Nature/Family Of Blood Doctor Who two-parter and Marvel's excellent Wisdom mini-series. A lovely bloke by all accounts.

http://viciousimagery.blogspot.com/
David Bishop is the writer of the new Thrill-Power Overload book about the history of 2000AD. He also has lots of interesting stuff to say about writing, TV, film and comics.