A Pleasant Cartoon

It’s been an odd few days since I cleaned out ten years of emails from my old email account. If you remember, I mentioned that there were probably 38,000 emails from eBay alone that I had to delete.

What I didn’t mention was that, as a result, I had to contact a certain organisation about my publishing record. During my inbox clean, I’d noticed lots of emails asking me to fix my account at one of these organisations that keep a track of royalty payments, etc., making sure that us (ha!) creative (snigger!) types don’t get stiffed (I wish!) on what they’re owed (urgh!).

I had never bothered because, honestly, I’ve never had a book be so successful that I cared about royalties. However, when I finally got around to check, I discovered that somebody had erroneously credited me with a BBC drama series from about ten years ago. Apparently, I was the writer and director of this particular hit show, which was a bit galling. I had to write to them to say I wasn’t the hugely successful writer of a similar name but the hugely unsuccessful writer of my own name…

Yet, still, for a brief second, I did get to imagine what it was like had I been commissioned by the BBC to make an epic drama series…

It certainly wasn’t the kind of crashing dose of reality I expected this week. I also didn’t expect today’s only email which was an announcement about John Shuttleworth’s 2021 tour. He’s added Glasgow’s Kings Theatre for Monday 15th March next year… By eck, as John Shuttleworth would probably say before tutting and pushing up has glasses.

I had rather been hoping to see an email announcing that I’d earned some income from Amazon for ebooks I’d sold in the past four weeks. Unless there’s something odd or arbitrary about the way these emails are generated, I’m now well past the point where it should have arrived. It means… well, I suppose it means that I didn’t sell anything in the past four weeks.

Not a single book.

Nowt.

Nada.

Zilch.

…

…

…

Ho hum, as they say, though whoever “they” were, they were probably feeling a lot chirpier about things than I am.

This would be a crushing blow if I had anything left to crush.

So, to mark this sad day, here’s one of five cheerful family-friendly cartoons I drew late last week and filed away (rather optimistically) under a folder I’d called “Book 4”.

I have half a mind to delete the folder but… I don’t know.

I just don’t know…

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Why Dunciad.com?

It’s a cool domain name and it was available. Yes, I know. Available. Crazy, isn’t it?

Really?

Yes. It also helps that it’s also my favourite satire written by Alexander Pope, one of the most metrically pure English poets who also knew his way around a crude insult or two. If you’ve not read it, you should give it a try.

So this is satire, right?

Can’t deny it. There will be some. But it’s also an experiment in writing and drawing, giving work away for free in order to see how many people are willing to support a writer doing his thing. It’s the weird stuff that I wouldn’t get published elsewhere in this word of diminishing demands and cookie-cutter tastes.