BANANAGRAMS! My friend, the cartoonist Lizz Lunney introduced me to the game around this time and I still enjoy it, though I lack playing partners now. The clackiness of the tiles is deeply satisfying. And I know all sorts of words, EGG, CHIPS, TOOT, WAFFLE, PIG, COW, and many more. I’m a devil of a player.
I have a few in-person events (in the UK) coming up:
Saturday June 27th – MACC-POW, Macclesfield
Saturday July 11th – Big City Reads: Meet The Authors, Nottingham Central Library 4-6pm.
Wednesday August 5th – Big City Reads (John Allison in conversation with Laura Snapes) 5.30-6.30pm
Saturday October 10th – SCARF, Sheffield (free entry!)
Sat/Sun November 14-15th Thought Bubble Festival, Harrogate
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The two Nottingham events have to be booked in advance, but they are both free.
Comments on comics will be closed Monday-Thursday until the autumn. They’ll open every Friday, for the weekend. This is not down to anyone’s bad behaviour, just a need for me to reduce the noise around the work I make. For the same reason, I won’t be monitoring social media replies and DMs any more. You can still contact me via email and the Patreon – I try to reply to every message I get.
In better news, my sabbatical is over and I am writing again and preparing to start drawing. I feel a lot better, and hopefully I will stay that way! You’ll get a short story (a vignette?) after the Murder She Writes rerun, then something longer.
A few people have been experiencing 431 errors when trying to view the site. I think this was a problem with cookies that one of this site’s plugins (Comments Like Dislike) was creating. I’ve deleted the plugin and added code to clear its cookies automatically. But that’s why you can’t “thumbs up” comments any more. Comment below if you’re still having issues and I’ll look for what else might be causing the problem.
In the last couple of days something very strange happened, another webcomic linked to me. This used to be common 20 years ago, but now is so unusual that I looked at my stats and couldn’t work out why they were up for several days in a row. So thank you to the creators of Cassiopeia Quinn. I have been thinking for weeks of instituting a new links list to (free) webcomics I like, but wondered if it wouldn’t just be archaic and weird. Once again, our old friend the cosmos, indeed Cassiopeia itself, has sent me a sign. So I will proceed.
[This was posted on Patreon last week, I realise some of you aren’t signed up to the free tier where you get the newsletters – sorry for the repeat if you do.]
From late April I am taking a two-month sabbatical from work. The long and the short of it is that I’ve completely worn myself out. About a month ago I realised I was going to have to take a serious, actual break. Usually, I get a second wind, a wind which on this occasion was not forthcoming. A friend got me to write down everything I’d done in the last two-and-a-half years, and it was ludicrous. It looked like four years work, if not more. Their words: “this reads like a really great death warrant”.
For a one-man show run by someone who lives alone, this is a serious decision. “Never give your readers a jumping-off point,” as I like to tell people. But my health is starting to suffer, so it’s best not to let things get catastrophic.
The next Solver story is finished, completing Volume 2, and will run throughout my break. After that, I’m going to re-run Murder She Writes (with commentary i.e. “mirthful asides”), Monday-Thursday for eight weeks. Not ideal, but I believe it’s been off the website for more than a decade, and it’s been titivated for a 15th anniversary reprint. Re-running it on badmachinery.com probably removes the need for a reprint, we shall see.
Patreon updates will continue, I have plenty in the queue, including a process zine that reprints a whole A4 notebook full of story notes and drawings. It is hefty.
My webcomics career has had phases – Bobbins, Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery, the various nostalgic excursions during my time writing Giant Days every month, and the pandemic and post-pandemic stage of Steeple, Solver and various glossy minis, created full US-format comic style. Six years seems to be about the structural limit of any of these broader projects for me, and I’m ready to rethink my approach, which is near-impossible when I’m in full production mode (which for nearly six years has been all the time).
So, once I feel like myself again, I’ll start thinking about how to go forward. I don’t know if anything will change, a rest might be enough. But I’m too tired right now to think about what I want to do. I don’t know what comes next, and in a way, that’s liberating. I have a lot of unused story ideas on the board – years’ worth. I don’t want to throw them away. And I love making comics. I hope that still comes through.
Thank you, as ever, for supporting me here.
JA
