Anyone for coffee in London tomorrow?

I set off for That Fancy London at dawn tomorrow so I can hear Tony Jordan talking at the Royal Court Theatre in the afternoon. The event doesn't start until 5.15pm, so I'm free for lunch or lunch on Wednesday if anybody's around in central London. Send me an email today if you're interested, here's the address: david AT davidbishop DOT co DOT uk. If you don't, I'll just end up spending a small fortune in specialist bookstores, so save me from myself and the addiction I like to call research.

What else? Comics creator Lew Stringer has some nice things to say on his blog about THRILL-POWER OVERLOAD, my newly published history of iconic British weekly 2000 AD. I've gotten lots of lovely emails from other creators complimenting me on the book, and it's been attracting plenty of praise from hardcore 2000 AD readers on the comic's message boards, too. Happily, Amazon has gotten the mighty tome back in stock, so you've no excuse not to order a copy - use the link on the right hand side of this blog. Over there, see? Just above the picture of that scary bloke with no hair.

Still grappling with the cast of the WWII soap I'm devising as the final project for my MA screenwriting course. It's about two families but I realised too much of my attention has focused on one of them, so I'm trying to beef up their backstories and give them more explosive, compelling plots. Thank goodness for wipe-clean white boards, it makes erasure and redrafting that much easier. Just wich my handwriting was a bit better, as it can be hard to interpret my rune-like scrawlings the next day when the white heat of inspiration's been replaced by the black fog of bafflement.

Not much else to report. Pretty much recovered from my trek up Tinto. Bemused by how many people are celebrating their birthday this week [hello Jonathan! Karen! Kerri! et al], including my little sister Annaliese. That's her, pictured above with some lunatic, when we were both somewhat younger. She's just hit a birthday with a zero at the end, always a milestone. Not only that, but she's also just gotten her degree after five years of hard slog while holding down a fulltime job. Hope you had a happy birthday, sis.