Winding up 2009

Last year ended in a frantically busy way. Across December there were meetings and schemings, markets and artworks, making the shop and etherially manning it, illustrating  a new picture book, roughing out another, working on stories, juggling ideas and concepts and generally frantically dog-paddling. Would I do anything else? Not on your life! But the week-long break over Christmas was well-needed.

So to summarise some 2009 things…

The online shop was brilliant – hordes of visitors and all in all a nice smooth system. Let me know any feedback please! Thanks for all the support and thanks to Peter for making it all run so brilliantly.

The exhibition dates were set for May 2010. It makes a huge difference to have an opening night to work toward now.

On an activist note, the campaign to stop the canning of the Parallel Importation restrictions was a success, thank goodness. There was a lot of weird press that went around last year relating to all of this. When this arises again, I can only hope that all of us will be involved in the process to come up with a good strategy and some clear aims this time – politicians, creators, publishers, book sellers, agents and societies, all. For now, with the digital book about to become a major player and change the book landscape in the next 5 years anyway, we have bigger fish to fry! How do we keep publishing alive, keep printing the glossy stuff we love, satisfy the need for low-price digital books and make sure that the people creating this stuff can still afford to do so? It’s going to be very interesting.

These arrived in December – the second glorious book in the Moorehawke trilogy by Celine Kiernan. And, joy of joys, the covers match up as they should! They’re also starting to get some attention, the first one being voted one of the top 5 covers of the year on this great blog. Yay! So here’s book one, and 2 of book two… because you could line up book two over and over for a long forest, if ever you should need one…

There was also gingerbread. Much much gingerbread, made by Peter and iced by me (mainly) for all our friends and family with kids. Sorry to those of you without kids. No gingerbread for you. And then as an antidote to all the cheerful houses we made, here are the gingerbread ZOMBIES. The trick is to make good use of the change-over time when the white icing is combining with the red icing in the icing syringe… it looks just like intestines.

And I have greened the studio a little with a yukka and random tubes of bamboo.

We are all getting along just fine.