
It was loads of fun talking with Monica, even after we finished recording. She reminds me a bit of my studio mate, Deadly Knitshade, in the way she understands the Internet and apps and things so well. These are really useful people to have around, and they're both great fun, too. Thanks for all the helpful tips, Monica!
Okay, lots more stuff to bookmark if you're interested! I've done a written interview over on the Tiny Pencil blog, about... using pencils! Funnily enough, just doing two pages for the Tiny Pencil Summerzine was so interesting that I adopted elements of the technique for the next picture book I started working on. (Just finishing that book now!)

Some great festivals coming up! Lots of festivals! I'm in Edinburgh this weekend so I'm gutted to be missing Caption Comics Festival in Oxford. But if you can go, DO. It's a brilliant place to meet up with other creative people and talk about making awesome stories. It's much more social than most comics conventions, with much more emphasis on the seminars and meeting people than on the comics sales, although you can pick up lots of great comics and t-shirts, too. Like this year's, designed by Rian Hughes!

David O'Connell's just blogged about Caption, and if you want to see what it's been like in past years, you can browse my earlier blog posts about it here. My favourite part is always Tony Hitchman's quiz night. You don't even have to know that much about comics to find it hysterically funny. He gives the best tour of the silliest and most jaw-dropping things you'll ever see in print. (See the whole list of events here.)
So this weekend I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Book Festival! And even though Oliver and the Seawigs is not technically comics, the excellent people in the special comics focus part of the festival, STRIPPED, have included Philip Reeve and me on the programme for its pre-launch event on Sunday, 2pm. (Book your place here!)

Big thanks to fellow writer and illustrator Cathy Brett for the mention in her Stripped interview! She has lots of good things to say about her work and career and it's definitely worth reading. Here we are at the Hay Festival earlier this year, and Cathy's drawing of the two of us! Here's the Stripped full list of events.
