Yesterday I went with Ellen Lindner and Myla Goldberg to Yauatcha in Soho, just around the corner from Berwick Street Market, for the most amazing dim sum and teacake selection! Ellen and Myla are both sophisticated New York literary people, so I felt like we should have been talking about complicated plot structures and things, but all I could think about was the cake:
My favourites were the white macaroons filled with what I think was almond paste and poppy seeds... mmmm.
Okay, sated by cake, I can now say that Myla's fascinating (even more fascinating than cake, really!) and I'm going straight away to read her bestselling novel, Bee Season. (You can read over 300 reviews of it on Amazon.) Myla's also written another novel called Wickett's Remedy, and she and her comics-making husband Jason Little are working on new books while they're doing a summer house-swap to London from their place in Brooklyn. And if you haven't read Ellen Lindner's Coney-Island-set graphic novel, Undertow, then what are you doing? She's also posted some great sketches from her recent trip to southern India. We were talking about her latest graphic novel project, it sounds really exciting - keep an eye on her blog to see what she's up to.
Just to prove to myself that I AM working on the Birdsong anthology, I'm posting the text I wrote for it this morning. I think the comic is going to peter out into wordlessness as the story kicks in. It's about something that happened to me at Limehouse Basin when I first got to London and didn't know anyone except Stuart. So 'morning writing' today instead of a morning sketch. (Hmm, I think sketches look nicer. The text in this one doesn't do a whole lot, other than set it up.)
